As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God’s people – historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant – is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself.

In sharp contrast to the idea that this stage of life is enviable, we hear high levels of anxiety about getting old, anxieties about health, mobility, access to facilities, simple routine care and attention.

Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality.

Well, today, the diocese is more than ever a microcosm.

To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one’s own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty.

In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation.

The twentieth century may tell us that we have nothing to be complacent about in the recent history of humankind; but it also tells us that there is nothing inevitable about tyranny.

Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners.

The Church exists to connect people at the level of their hunger for a new world.

To be a Christian is to believe we are commanded and authorised to say certain things to the world; to say things that will make disciples of all nations.

Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society.

A public is a necessary fiction.

St Paul, in his second letter to Corinth, spells this out further in the important eighth and ninth chapters, where he urges some of the Christian communities to be generous to others so that they may also have the chance to be generous in return.

Christian teaching about sex is not a set of isolated prohibitions; it is an integral part of what the Bible has to say about living in such a way that our lives communicate the character of God.

And when the world is created, it is created in such a way that those eternal objects of God’s loving wisdom become actualities – interacting with one another, relating to God in the finite realm.

Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.

It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God’s call to reveal to the world what God’s purpose is for humanity.

A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.

The Church is the new creation, it is life and joy, it is the sacramental fellowship in which we share the ultimate purpose of God, made real for us now in our hearing the Word and sharing the Sacrament.

As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God’s people – historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant – is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself.

To conclude: good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context.

One of the most powerful defences the media can offer for controversial actions is, of course, public interest.

The answer was that in Burundi, having a clean bill of health has taken on a very particular meaning: unless and until you have paid for your hospital treatment, you simply can’t leave, you are in effect a captive.

In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied.

Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.

So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.

The world’s creation has a beginning from the world’s point of view, not from God’s.

Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor – but the Church is not a campaign.

In the context of interfaith encounter, we need to bring to the surface how our actual beliefs shape what we do – not simply to agree that kindness is better than cruelty.

Keeping our eyes on journey’s end is what we need – the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety.

Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.