This article by Jenny Sinclair was first published as a chapter in Celebrating Forty Years of Faith in the City, a book of essays reflecting on the significance of the Faith in the City report. Edited by Joe Forde and Terry Drummond, the book was published by Sacristy Press in 2025. Jenny’s chapter is reproduced here in full (approx 9,000 words) with the kind permission of the editors and the publisher.
Introduction
The language-world of Faith in the City was the soundtrack of my teens. I left home in 1980, five years before it was published, but Urban Priority Areas, unemployment, jobs, investment, poverty, social justice, welfare, the poor, deprivation, the unions, the Labour Party, the Thatcher government - this was the currency of our kitchen table.
I preferred Liverpool’s music scene. As the daughter of Bishop David Sheppard, forging my own path was not straightforward. Earlier, in London in the early seventies, our home had been the focal point of conversations between those who would later be the key instigators of the report. As a little girl, I watched Eric James, Robert Runcie and others come and go.
As a young adult, estranged from the faith, I avoided everything church related. I found employment in local government. In my mid-twenties, a dark-night-of-the-soul conversion in 1988 led me to be received into the Catholic Church. I married and worked as a graphic artist and in various charities. While my father’s prominence in the Church of England grew, I chose a quiet life.
Things changed in 2011, after both my parents had died. I experienced a movement of the Spirit. This was just before the Tottenham riots, and I was sensing a social instability, the beginnings of the unravelling that is now evident to all. People were comparing the comparatively weak response from the churches with the partnership1 between my father and Archbishop Derek Worlock in the 1970s - 1990s. Their twenty-year friendship had played a pivotal role in Liverpool at a time of upheaval in the early 1980s. I was being prompted - against my own inclinations - to ask, “what happened to the Sheppard-Worlock spirit?”
Others soon joined me. Over a couple of years of researching the partnership, we found that it had two defining features. First, a joint servant leadership, encouraging an “outward-facing church” that engages with the life of the neighbourhood, and second, their focus on the dignity of the human person and solidarity with poor communities.
This Spirit-movement and historical reflection led to the creation of Together for the Common Good. But while we are inspired by their example, we recognise that this is a new time, with different challenges requiring new approaches. Independent of any denomination, and dedicated to spiritual and civic renewal, we are a small national charity working across the churches, helping leaders and young people discover and fulfil their vocation for the common good. Our understanding, rooted in the tradition of Catholic Social Thought, sees the common good not as a utopian ideal but as ‘the shared life of a society’ that is built ‘by working together across our differences, each taking responsibility, according to calling and ability.’2
Assumptions
For many Anglican clergy, Faith in the City has a special place in their hearts. For some, it inspired their calling to ministry. For significant parts of the Christian community, its engagement with the realities of British life remains a high watermark of social concern. Others, better equipped to do this than I, have assessed its legacy. But for me, its 40th anniversary offers an opportunity to re-examine the vocation of the Church3 in our own time.
My father is regarded as one of the prime instigators of the report. It is therefore relevant to note the influence of Bias to the Poor.4 I have lost count of the number of people who have told me that this book was an inspiration for them.
What Catholics call the ‘preferential option for the poor’5, is more relevant than ever. But I believe that my father’s preferred way of showing that bias and preference is far too top-down to meet the situation we face today. Fundamentally, he believed that the Church and the State, rather than poor people themselves, should be the prime agents of change.
Bias to the Poor called for a government-led wealth redistribution and for a government-mandated social wage for the low paid and unemployed. Such moves now seem to rely too much on easily abused and often dehumanising centralised state power, and fail to address both the underlying economic causes and the extent of their impact. The book’s advocacy on behalf of poor communities also sounds patrician, overlooking the aspirations and autonomy of the people involved, and underestimating the problems caused by benefit-dependency.
First published on January 1st, 1983, Bias to the Poor contained some of the key assumptions underpinning Faith in the City which was published just under two years later. Assumptions that were to shape the dynamic between the mainstream Christian denominations and poor communities for two generations.
Much has happened since these publications appeared. We see marked decline in attendance across most of the institutional churches, poverty has got worse, and we find ourselves in a moment of unprecedented geopolitical and cultural upheaval. In such a scenario, it is vital for Christians to read the signs of the times with care and attention.
READING THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
To begin this process, we need to understand the root causes of the malaise facing the West. If we do not dig deep, our responses are likely to be inadequate. Understanding context is vital. We may address symptoms but fail to comprehend the times. We may approach evangelisation without understanding political economy. If Christian leaders make the wrong call, we may inadvertently promote the injustices we wish to eliminate.
The rethinking needs to be profound, because many of our assumptions - political, social, cultural - are likely to be out of date. This is a new time that warrants an honest examination of conscience, a process that will help with the discernment around how God is calling the Church to play its part.
Catholic Social Thought
There is no such thing as a neutral worldview. So let me be clear about the position I am taking. I listen and learn across the Christian traditions and in particular draw on Catholic Social Thought (CST). My interpretation of this tradition is grounded in political reality by reading a wide range of journalism, and by consulting with political thinkers, philosophers and grassroots communities.
Rooted in the gospel, CST is a body of thinking intended as a gift for all people of goodwill, a deep theological tradition that draws on social and political expertise, data and lived experience from across the world to help us read the signs of the times.
Sometimes referred to as “the theology of the Holy Spirit in practice”, it began at the end of the 19th century as a response to the effects of the Industrial Revolution on working men and families. Now as then, it seeks to uphold the integrity of human beings and creation, and to interrogate structures of power that dehumanise. For many, it stands out as the most coherent theological framework for understanding the world.
At its heart is a notion of justice that demands that we look at what is happening to people, to families, relationships, communities, the natural world, in concrete terms right here, where we are. It identifies three sources of power: the two earthly powers of money and state, and the one relational, transcendent power of human beings in relationship with each other and with God.
It recognises the tension between capital and labour and argues for a balance between them, emphasising the priority of decent work and the dignity of labour.6 Within the Catholic tradition, work is seen as something that gives life meaning and through which we are called by God to help shape the world.
The tradition does recognise the importance of wealth creation and that businesses can and do achieve a great deal of social good. However, there is a realism about the damage that capital can do when it is over-concentrated and under-constrained. Its tendency to exploit and dehumanise workers, to commodify human beings and the natural world, must be kept in check.
It is significant that this tradition is nonpartisan. It has even-handedly condemned all dehumanising modern political-economic systems: communist, socialist and liberal as much as capitalist. All of them are judged to be deeply corrupted by the materialist, spiritually empty premises established by the narrow rationalism of the atheistic Enlightenment.
What we see
When we read the signs of the times, first we say what we see.
We see that too many young people cannot afford a home. We see that social trust is breaking down. We see the symptoms of what Pope Francis calls a ‘malign’7 culture – consumerism, extreme inequality, indifference to the poor, the collapse of trust in institutions, and subordination of the local to the national, global, and digital. We see sclerotic health systems, the atrophy of local forms of human association. We see the disconnect between the managerial class and the population. We see massive public and private debt. We see the tragedy of displaced people. We see the catastrophic damage done to the natural world. We also see the ‘malign culture’ in the liberalising of abortion and assisted dying, in the industrialisation of human exploitation – the commercialising of surrogacy, gender medicine, the normalising of cosmetic surgery, organ harvesting, sexual exploitation, human trafficking.
We see people bravely trying to navigate these storms. We see extraordinary examples of resilience and humanity. But we are also seeing a steep rise in symptoms of human distress - growing loneliness (higher among the young than the old8), increases in addiction, self-harm, depression, nihilism, indifference, feelings of meaninglessness. We see the tyranny of a social media culture incentivising a false idea of freedom.9
Political economy
The CST tradition helps us to see what is going on in terms of political economy. From Rerum Novarum (1891), to Laborem Excercens (1981), Centesimus Annus (1991), to Caritas in Veritate (2009), Laudato Si (2015) and Fratelli Tutti (2020), (to name just a few), the great papal encyclicals of this tradition train our instincts to the effects of the economy on human beings and nature.
Looking through this lens, we see a system that has undermined the dignity of work, requiring units of labour to be cheap and mobile; that has offshored our manufacturing jobs to low wage economies; that encourages the importing of workers, away from their own families, to take up low paid jobs that prop up Western business models. This is a system described as “frictionless” by investors, but in human terms, it became a recipe for social unrest.
Four decades ago, the idea of moving to find work was regarded as right wing. This is now rebranded as “freedom”. This transactional freedom is what led to deindustrialisation. It broke parts of our country.
The loss of jobs and investment - with no meaningful replacement - led to civic degradation on a vast scale. Not only in “urban” settings in cities and outer estates, but especially in our coastal towns and former industrial heartlands. It led to the discarding of whole communities, who, to add insult to injury, were then framed as deficient and backward. On top of this, the knowledge economy and the service economies shamed manual labour, further exacerbating the class divide.10
What we have witnessed is effectively a politics of abandonment. There is a political and economic bias against the poor. In human terms, the impact of the new, post-industrial economy has been catastrophic, devastating to the common good.
Liberalism
In 2015, Pope Francis asserted that ‘we are not living in an epoch of change so much as an epochal change.’11 He was among those able to identify that the old era was breaking down. This is a time between eras, which can be described as an interregnum.
Every era is shaped by a particular philosophy. The animating idea of the era that is in the process of breaking down comes from the philosophy of liberalism.12 Liberal ideas have done much good, but today’s dominant form of liberalism, the ideology of neoliberalism, turns Enlightenment ideals of freedom into a tawdry and narrow economic logic, in which the free pursuit of profit maximisation becomes the highest good.
Constraints on finance capital have been removed, and transactional individualism has been promoted. The result is globalisation; a global financial system which largely serves the interests of supranational corporations. The optimal neoliberal arrangement has low wages, big governments that serve businesses, and large welfare states to keep away revolutionary discontent.13 In the neoliberal economic vision, there is nothing wrong with relying on increasingly precarious and meaningless jobs that pay wages too low to live on.
This model of political economy also reshaped our conception of welfare. With over 5.93m people in the UK currently in receipt of Universal Credit,14 we have shifted from a culture of community interdependence to the impersonal support of money transfers and the government provision of services.
The impacts of this system are not just economic. The reshaping of our conception of work has affected our personal relationships. A labour market dominated by low skill, low security jobs, on top of an inflated property market, has undermined family formation and weakened the confidence of the young in their adult prospects. The philosophy underpinning the neoliberal model has led to profound social and moral consequences too.
The Catholic economist Luigino Bruni says that this system ‘gives birth to and fosters its own sense of being human’; that ‘it engenders the promise of interpersonal relationships without the wound of the other.’15
Its amoral incentives to fragmentation eat away at shared values and erode our sense of citizenship; it dissolves the particularity of place; its commodification is undoing what it means to be human. Its individualism ferments multiple pathologies: relationship breakdown, loneliness, mental health disorders, crime, the breakdown of social trust, spiritual, cultural and moral confusion. It results in a de-moralisation.
This is why we see the emergence, on both the progressive left and the extreme right, of identitarian politics, distorted forms of victimhood, authoritarian tendencies, the battle of rights and the culture wars.
In this paradigm we are pitted against each other on the basis of identity and opinion, a polarisation that alienates us from each other. The result is a distraction from the fundamental problem, which is a dysfunctional political economy generating poverty in all its forms - economic, relational and spiritual. It is very important to understand this distraction.
Within this system there is a denial of the transcendent and a dominance of the material. This denial subverts natural law and generates an anti-human system that some call ‘the machine’16. Our eyes may be trained to the so-called “cost of living crisis”, but this is just one symptom of a deeper dysfunction.
Anthropology
The type of operating system that this philosophy generates is inherently unstable because it is founded upon a false anthropology - a desiccated, soulless conception of the human being which generates a false idea of freedom. At the core of this is freedom from constraint – including from country, from history, from religion, from God, and now even from human nature itself.
In its extreme form, this cult of freedom sees family as a constraint, and tradition and accountability as obstacles to “progress”; even relationship to place is reframed as old fashioned. Ultimately, its relativism “liberates” society from truth and from mutual responsibility.17
Its view of the human being incorporates the idea of “the unencumbered self”, emphasising rights over responsibilities, corroding our sense of mutual obligation. It is effectively an assault on relationship.
This philosophy denies the primacy of God and creates a cult of self. This is quite different from a Christian anthropology where human beings are understood to be transcendent, relational beings, made in the image of God.
This individualism drives a political economy where we outsource more and more of the things we used to do as communities to the state or to the market: childcare, care for our civic environment, entertainment, care of the elderly. The results include family breakdown, isolation, the fragmentation of communities, corruption and spiritual confusion.
The motivation of this spirit is anti-human, which is why the system is now unravelling. Every country that follows this system is seeing the same effects. Beneath its shiny veneer, we are faced with a disintegration. With a relativistic and materialist logic – no truth and no beauty – its worldview ultimately brings about its own destruction, and in the meantime, ‘as the old is dying, and the new cannot yet be born…a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’18
Our modern pharaohs
CST has long warned about the centralisation of power, whether of capital or the state, because it undermines human relationships, weakens social bonds and undermines local agency and democracy. The principalities and powers of our time can be conceptualised as our modern pharaohs.
Whenever finance capital dominates, it has the tendency to dehumanise and exploit. It presents with a friendly face, but its business is the commodification of creation and the financialisation of everything: land, water, homes, human beings.
We see for example, venture capital offering to pay huge sums to farming families for their land.19 At the same time, we see the state making increasing financial demands on family farms and family businesses.
Governments are becoming more authoritarian, with more decisions taken outside of the democratic process. Around the world post-Covid, we have seen government overreach, with increasing surveillance, censorship and the cultivation of self-censorship, and growing interest in digital social credit systems to control behaviour. The results are sure to be disastrous. As John Paul II said, ‘collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it.’20
While some find it hard to believe that totalitarianism - even the soft ‘dictatorship of relativism’ that the then-Cardinal Ratzinger warned about - is a real threat in our time,21 these developments, together with artificial intelligence, foreshadow a dreadful future. Pope Francis too, has repeatedly warned about the rise of ‘the technocratic paradigm’22 in which “human nature” is seen as a problem to be managed and corrected. He insists that: ‘We would condemn humanity to a future without hope if we took away people’s ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives.’23
And now we see a collusion between our modern pharaohs, where governments act in the interests of big corporations, insulating them from democratic accountability. This modern Egypt, a corrupt merger of corporate and state power, operates a different kind of slavery, hidden behind a list of pseudo-freedoms. The malign spirit says, “you can have mobility, consumer choice, rights and self-determination! You only have to obey a few sensible rules, and not dream about higher things.”
DISCONTENT
The liberal consensus is supported across almost the entire British political class. The founding values of both major parties were abandoned as the ideology of neoliberalism became dominant,.24 Over forty years, the Conservatives forgot their calling to conserve, and Labour lost touch with those who actually labour. Their expressions were different, but both parties were colonised by the same hyper-liberal dogma, in effect becoming a “uni-party,”25 disconnected from reality on the ground.
This philosophy shows up on the right as neoliberal economics, and on the left as hyper-liberal social norms. Both versions are driven by the same logic; they regard limits and borders as unjust and regressive. Each has a blind spot: the right attributes moral unravelling to excessive liberalism, but somehow the neoliberal economic system gets a free pass; the left attributes poverty to neoliberal economics, but accepts unlimited self-actualisation, which is seen as progressive.
This misadventure, whether intentional or through naivety or neglect, can be regarded as a liberal hegemony. It led to gross mismanagement by successive governments and has been provoking increasing discontent.
The so-called “left behind” had enough. After four decades of devastation, they had nothing left to lose. In previous eras their actions might have been understood as a peasants’ revolt.26
Opposition has extended to the truckers in Canada; Dutch, German and British farmers; the Gilet Jaunes in France; the multi-country disquiet around mass immigration, net zero policies, and the gender industry; to poor employment conditions, wage stagnation and high inflation. Although labelled “populist”, and despite bad actors harming their credibility, these movements have broad support. This is the resistance of the excluded majority. The hyper liberal project is being rejected.27
While the “legacy” (mainstream) media have ignored or downplayed these developments, a courageous field of independent journalists and commentators has served an audience hungry for authenticity. Growing dissent has fuelled disarray among many established parties, as in the UK and most of Europe, and a political realignment in the United States.
Objections have been framed as extremist in the most derogatory terms by an elite, liberal, managerial ‘overclass’28 in an attempt to retain control of the narrative. They could not accept - or even understand - that what they termed “populism” was actually ‘political blowback against the social disruption that their policies have created.’29
In the UK, the mainstream political class has become almost entirely disconnected from the basic things that most people – not just the most left-behind – care about. It is as if politicians are saying, ‘we don’t have any ideas, any viable policies to give you dignified and meaningful work, to sort out your housing issues; we don’t know how to get the younger generation on the housing ladder.’ This is how Anna Rowlands puts it. She adds, ‘this is the disgrace and the dishonesty of the politics that we live with.’ 30
The 2024 American Presidential Election produced a decisive rejection of globalisation and progressivism. It is yet to become clear how this will play out in practice. The new political divide is now31 between the transhumanist oligarchs and the interests of a broad multi-racial, multi-faith working class. What matters to most people is family, place, decent work, stability, security, economic justice, truth and common sense.
The question now is who can deliver a common good political economy that can underpin a social peace32, defend our liberties, meet the needs of families and develop a new orthodoxy capable of taking our society into the future. Populist parties may be asking some of the right questions, but they do not have the answers. In this change of era, volatility will continue until a new settlement is reached. Meanwhile, we can be sure, even if globalisation is over, that neoliberal interests will use whatever means and disguises they can to ensure that their economic model continues uninterrupted.
Christian Justice
It is imperative that the way we think about justice is consistent with our faith. Christianity is not libertarian, neither is it welfarist or utilitarian. Rather, rooted in the ancient rabbinical tradition, the Christian model of justice is concerned with right relationship, with God and with each other.
For example, the Torah’s laws on helping someone in debt33 involve detailed relational elements. The lender is obliged to accompany the borrower, providing support and advice, and, must ‘exact no interest from them’ (Exodus 22:24).
This points us in a radically different direction from the way poverty is addressed by our current welfare state arrangements, where help is likely to mean the digital transfer of cash, leaving the person alone in their flat. This utilitarian, welfarist method, following the individualistic paradigm, aims for efficiency and cost effectiveness. But its systems are neither efficient nor cost effective. They are hugely expensive, and, minimising human connection, they generate unnecessary suffering.
Campaigns that simply call for more benefits perpetuate this utilitarian, rights-based model of justice. The relational imperative ought to be at the heart of Christian campaigns.
Failure to understand the neoliberal political economy has allowed identitarian politics to dominate our conception of justice. For example, treating issues of inequality predominantly in terms of cultural, rights-based intersectionality categories undermines social solidarity and displaces economic justice. This divisive model suits our modern pharaohs, because it splinters opposition and keeps wages low.
A model of justice based on Christian anthropology does not pit low paid or poor people against each other according to identity. Rather, Christian justice starts with the assumption that human beings thrive in relationship, not on their own. It takes the form of listening to the concerns of all workers34 and then building relationships between them. From this solidarity alliances are forged, as with the best trades unions, capable of negotiating with the powers.
In God’s economy, if you’re having a hard time, I’m to walk in relationship with you and accompany you until you get back on your feet, for as long as it takes. It may involve some money or helping you get a job, but primarily it is about accompaniment. Not just give you cash and leave you alone. The Christian justice tradition is anchored in God’s economy of mutual obligation and right relationship.
Every year Pope Francis publishes a letter for the World Day of the Poor. He insists that our response is personal, that we are to stop outsourcing, that solutions are not to be found in activism or welfarism.35 We are not to use the welfare system or charitable agencies as a way of keeping poor people at arm’s length. This is consistent with the Personalism tradition favoured by John Paul II, Dorothy Day, and the Catholic Worker Movement.36
Our primary relationships as human beings should be with each other rather than with state agencies, the market and impersonal institutions. At a time of increasing global instability, these right relationships with our neighbours - local, embedded, embodied, grounded, across ethnicity, sex, age, background and opinion - will become more and more important.
WHOSE SIDE IS THE CHURCH ON?
Reflecting on the last forty years, we can see that in the mid-1980s the neoliberal system was just beginning. Its impact since then has been immense. If Faith in the City had appreciated the true nature of that era, its recommendations might have been different.
Since then, many communities with proud civic histories have been abandoned and even demonised. Some churches have offered sympathy, but very few leaders have so far demonstrated an understanding of the political economy underlying this civic degradation. These communities have been as let down by the Church as they have by the political class.
To discern our way forward, we should begin by exploring what we can learn from Jesus in His time. There are parallels between our modern Egypt and the Roman economy in Galilee,37 where Jesus was the son of a carpenter. The Roman system privileged the elites who controlled the storehouses and kept down the wages of the workers.
Jesus resisted the excesses of this political economy by promoting the kingdom of heaven. His centre of gravity was with the poor, the meek and the lowly: people who had been humiliated, those who suffered, were despised, who had been abandoned. Like the prophets before him, he judged harshly those who were indifferent to the poor.
His instinct was not to start a factional campaign group, but to bring people together in solidarity, across class, ethnicity and educational background, to build a common life. Jesus promoted a non-violent sacrificial resistance characterised by love and just relationship.
From the gospels, CST derives a framework for good judgement. Among its key principles are solidarity, subsidiarity, the dignity of work, participation, stewardship and the preferential option for the poor. This integrated framework, underpinned by discernment of the Holy Spirit, centres around upholding the integrity and dignity of the human being and the natural world.
These principles call us, just as our Lord called the people he met in Galilee, to be the embodiment of love in a desecrated world. To build the common good with God and neighbour in the places where we live. To accompany each other in solidarity, to offer some resistance to the domination of the principalities and powers. To hold a sacred space in which human beings can be together to encounter the transcendent. To create places to be loved and heard, to share and build bonds, a sense of family.
Much of the work of the Church Urban Fund, the Together Network, and the numerous other networks that have developed over the last forty years embody this relational spirit. There is much to be proud of.
However, serious questions hang over the Christian social action landscape. Volunteer burnout is widespread, many churches are vulnerable, funding is under huge pressure, need is greater, social problems are more complex, and poverty is getting worse. Perhaps most concerning is the increasingly estranged dynamic between many Christians and poor communities.
How the Church responds in this period of unprecedented change is of great importance. To discern this response, we can start by looking honestly at some of the problems around this estrangement.
The question of language
The language world that has developed in Christian social action circles is revealing. Terms like “client”, “outreach” and “service delivery” - even “social action” itself - do not reflect a culture of friendship and mutual respect. Likewise, professional class terminology like “community development”, “projects” and “facilitators” betrays a mindset common to government and NGO culture. One way to explore this is to check which words can be said in front of someone who is poor.
This is challenging for those used to thinking of themselves as activists or service providers. Clearly there are distinctions between charitable organisations and individual Christians. But such managerial approaches can risk engineering out the possibility of hearing the Holy Spirit and make vital, smaller, more informal activity look trivial.
By contrast, a covenantal or synodal38 spirituality of listening and dwelling with our neighbours39 is more suitable for our time. Such a posture involves a shift from “host” to “neighbour.” This demands some unlearning, patience and availability. Funding is secondary.
The term “marginalised” may sound appropriate from a church activist position, but it depends where you stand. In God’s worldview, poor people are not marginal. The number of people classified as poor in the UK alone is currently around 14 million.40 That includes those who are working, unemployed and destitute. That is a lot of people. It doesn’t feel “marginal” to me, even by worldly political standards. We are now post-Christendom and the dynamics have changed: it is now the Church which is marginalised.
The food bank paradox
The food bank paradox41 is well-known: while they are vital, we wish they didn’t exist. But there is a bigger problem. The more efficient emergency food aid becomes, the less urgent economic reform appears. This helps to mask the need for the prophetic. Tragically, the food bank network is now baked into a toxic political economy that props up big corporations.
From the perspective of the CST tradition, any activity around food poverty must be situated within well-articulated demands for economic reform, for decent jobs, retraining, for place-based investment – ‘to restore the places long devastated’ (Isaiah 61). CST is also insistent that the dignity of decent, fulfilling work should be central to a politics of the common good. We must not capitulate to a combination of low wage precarious jobs, worklessness, and welfare.
Food banks and associated support services, along with other forms of social action are often sources of pride among churches wanting to serve the community and to demonstrate their usefulness, especially in an increasingly secularised culture. There is of course a vital role for charity, but the Church is not called to be a handmaid to the state: it has a sacred vocation to be transformational, not to be useful.
Churches may be providing vital services, but the service-client dynamic can inadvertently alienate the very people it aims to help, and, can lead to burnout among those who volunteer. The more visionary leaders have responded by integrating relational elements into their work, such as cafes and conversation.
But Pope Francis goes much further: he says that Christians must stop seeing charity in a service provider mindset and instead look to living a shared life. He says we ‘must commit to a mutual sharing of life that does not allow proxies’.42
Church-based food activity has this potential, to be a place of communion at the heart of congregational life, where people in need are no longer peripheral, passive recipients but active companions. This can look like a place to meet and talk, to be known and to be blessed - a place of nourishment in the broadest sense. And more: to be a place of mutuality and reciprocity, with opportunities to help, to create and produce.
Churches must learn to receive as well as give: to become communities of place, where being relational is less of a project and more of a disposition. In this way charity acquires a constructive, restorative role that addresses the breakdown of trust, loneliness, the loss of agency, the atrophy of local institutions, and other consequences of neoliberalism.
(Dis)empowerment
In writing about Faith in the City, Greg Smith43 observed the need to move on from the Temple tradition and the condescending ‘effortless superiority’ of the established Church. These power dynamics are not restricted to the Anglican Church: they have roots in the wider culture. It can be helpful to unpack certain elements.
Many Christian charities and volunteering models, just as in mainstream society, have been infected by the culture of individualism, falling into patterns of transactional exchange between the active deliverer or rescuer and the passive recipient, of whom nothing is asked.
It is also true that many Christians say they feel safer in a service-provider posture, or in fundraising for charity, than in getting to know their neighbours. Often there is fear of getting too involved with troubled families. There are issues of confidence and tensions around class.
The scale of class estrangement must not be underestimated. Questions of class and the churches go beyond the wellbeing and recruitment of clergy and barriers to belonging, as important as these issues are. There is a wider problem that needs to be understood. Much of the Church over the last forty years – just like the Labour Party44 and many of our other institutions – has been captured by a middle-class culture and has lost connection with poor communities.
An army veteran I know (who goes to church) said, ‘The church has become a woke foodbank. Handouts are soul destroying. People need dignified work so they can maintain some self-respect.’
There are many examples that challenge this perception, and the Church has been truly heroic in the quiet determination of thousands of volunteers in meeting overwhelming need. But it must be said that the inability to comprehend the underlying cultural trends has been a significant factor in class estrangement. If Faith in the City had had a more robust theology of political economy, it might have sown the seeds of a better story.
Just as then, many Christians now also fail to recognise the philosophy that lies behind the neoliberal system. Rather than addressing the root causes, there is a tendency to see issues of hunger and poverty in the context of welfare solutions.
Advocacy campaigns to “end poverty” and calls for adjustments to benefits reduce the causes of poverty to government austerity measures. Supposed solutions are then found in monetary redistribution through the tax system. The fundamental problems of the malign culture are ignored.
This kind of piecemeal approach, often claiming to be “prophetic”, barely addresses the causes, and gives the principalities and powers a free pass. Despite all the good work taking place, the Church is then perceived to be an enabler of the system. More insidious still, this posture feeds a politics of low expectations.
The service-client dynamic can deprive a person of their agency, and over time de-skill and entrench dependency and entitlement. By contrast, a relational approach, as Jon Kuhrt has said45, can be more effective in terms of building up a person’s confidence. Quoting a formerly homeless woman who said, ‘It’s alright all these agencies giving people things, but you have to want to help yourself…’, Jon emphasises the importance of enabling personal responsibility and ‘the balance between grace and truth’.
The issues around this dynamic reflect the creative tension in CST between solidarity - standing alongside those affected by poverty and advocating for economic justice - and subsidiarity, the principle encouraging responsibility to be taken at the appropriate level, empowering people to help themselves, according to their ability.
As Pope Benedict XVI said: ‘Subsidiarity is first and foremost a form of assistance to the human person [which] respects personal dignity by recognising in the person a subject who is always capable of giving something to others.’46 This is not only significant for people finding themselves in debt, destitution, unemployment, or with chronic health conditions. It is particularly important in relation to struggling families. Parents desperately need help to withstand the effects of the malign culture on family life. Helping a family in difficulty to reach a place of strength and independence is a gift of inestimable value.
Christian activists have consistently asserted their role as “a voice for the voiceless”. There is much vital advocacy going on here, from raising awareness of modern slavery to housing problems. However, sometimes the issues can be limited to the perspective of the advocate (and their funders), rather than reflecting the actual concerns of poor communities. Despite platforms in charity campaign videos and poverty truth commissions, a middle class presumption persists that the poor don’t truly understand their own interests.
Democratic events since 2016 have shown that people from poor communities do have a voice. Their interpretation of the times, however, was different from that of most Christian leaders and activists whose position aligned with that of the establishment and big corporates.47 It should not then be a surprise that so many poor and working class communities have become estranged from the Church.
A NEW STORY: COMMUNION
The coming years in the UK may be hard. These times may call for a kind of tragic realism,48 but they also demand a new language deeper and more resonant than that of the urban church era. We are invited into a story of civic and spiritual renewal, of truth, beauty and goodness.
The language of CST can not only help us to read the signs of the times and call out structures of sin. It can also to inspire us to build structures of grace.
Without being prescriptive or theocratic, the tradition helps us discern a holistic, constructive response that bridges the false dichotomy between evangelisation and social concerns. Pope John Paul II puts it in these terms: ‘God is entrusting to you the task, at once difficult and uplifting, of working with Him in the building of the civilisation of love.’49
This is humble but hugely ambitious. Our response to the culture of individualism and the threat of a technocratic future begins, in humility, with listening, to God and to our fellow citizens. But given that so many churches have become disconnected from their local communities, the place to start is not so much with projects, programmes, and funding applications, but by spending time with our neighbours.
Congregations can develop a practice of listening in the neighbourhood, through the art of the one-to-one conversation.50 Always anchored in practices of prayer, such as lectio divina51, the aim is not to recruit for a project or a campaign, but simply to have the honour of hearing a person’s story. From this listening, relationships will develop, and what matters to people will become clear. Then, all manner of meaningful things will happen.
These times require speaking truth. Intimidation by political correctness has been a scourge and the Church should refuse it. Without open deliberation, the common good is impossible. Indeed, ‘truth speech connects us. It is the truth that restores the ties between people.’52 To be truly countercultural, churches ought to be convening social spaces where people are free to speak, where there is respect for diversity of opinion and disagreement is possible without fear.
People need company and are yearning for meaning. The loneliness, isolation and spiritual hunger of our times derive from the individualistic and nihilistic philosophy underpinning our culture. To assist people in the unveiling of the sacred, there is a distinctive role for churches in this work of repair, using liturgy both inside and outside church in communal acts of celebration, pilgrimage and solidarity. Our spiritual practices, across the Christian traditions, are rich in both depth and diversity. From fasting to the Eucharist, a new confidence is called for.
Each of us can enable a better story, by living out what it means to love and to care, to suffer with and to trust, to forgive, to be sacrificial and to show what it means to be a companion, a friend, a good neighbour. These things are fast becoming elusive, especially among the young. It is necessary to be intentional.
Pope Francis warns that young people are the most vulnerable to the effects of the malign culture, which he says, ‘makes them feel like losers, introduces illusions about the meaning of life, promotes a transactional paradigm, and the idolatry of physical perfection.’53
The Church can tell a better story through accompaniment - unmediated by digital platforms - in the ups and downs of life, the natural experiences of birth and death; where people can share what it means to be human and what it means to be a person with a soul.
Pope Francis has urged world leaders to recognise the imminent threat to humanity from artificial intelligence and the new transhumanist industries. He stresses the importance of ‘politics’, of strengthening democratic processes, to uphold human agency.54 The new industrial revolution is not all negative, but it opens the way to the exploitation of the human being on an unprecedented scale, and it has the potential to shame the physical, eclipsing reality.
In this context, the theology of place55 and local relationships become especially significant. The writings of John Inge56, Andrew Rumsey57, Alison Milbank58 and Martin Robinson59 are helpful here. They can help develop what is most needed: a covenantal model of church and parish, committed to the local, which lives and breathes, celebrates and grieves with the people of the neighbourhood.
These times also call for a better literacy about what a common good political economy involves. The fundamental cultural change required cannot be achieved only by government. A common good story of renewal requires both solidarity – commitment to the good of all – and subsidiarity – where responsibility is taken, whenever possible, by the smallest, lowest, or least centralised competent authority rather than by a higher and more distant one. We can begin to imagine a new vision in which everyone is called to play their part:
In this new settlement at the national level, governments will balance different interests, for example, across class and educational background, between business and unions, young and old, urban and rural, migrants and host communities60, capital and labour. Governments support the conditions that prioritise communities and families; they deconcentrate the power of capital by permitting regional banks and energy providers, and by fostering shorter food supply chains.
State power is distributed, where appropriate, by resourcing autonomy at local and regional levels. Welfare is delivered through national mutuals61 based on the contributory principle. A national industrial strategy centred around the dignity of work, implemented locally, incentivises place-based investment, job creation and retraining – balancing environmental measures with livelihoods. At the heart of this new settlement is a unifying narrative, and a restoration project to correct the damage done to the most abandoned places.
At the regional level, there is intentional collaboration between businesses, employers, investors, educational bodies, regional associations, religious and other networks working together for the renewal of their region, attracting investment to create a robust economy with decent jobs for local people.
At the local level, local government creates conditions that enable a civil economy and the autonomy of local people to run their own organisations. Relationships grow between local businesses, schools, sports clubs, charities, local associations, churches and other religious bodies; each meeting local needs, working together for the good of the community, enabling local people to find fulfilment.62 This local ecosystem, centred around the recognition that the family is the fundamental building block of society, is geared to cultivate family life, encouraging families to support each other and their neighbours, and to teach young people civic responsibility and the importance of good local relationships.63
At the personal level there is a culture of civic friendship64, of mutuality, of borrowing and lending, a reciprocal gift economy. There is more interdependence and less reliance on market and state.
Each Christian has a particular vocational responsibility to fulfil. Despite determined attempts to undermine and privatise Christianity, and intense pressure to conform to secular ideologies, the faithful are called not to hide away but to play our part to bring about this common good vision.
Amidst all the brokenness, we must live with the expectation that God is at work. Our calling is to become attuned to the movements of the Spirit in the mundane, in conversations at the bus stop, in the taxi, in the local shop. Moments of mutual acknowledgement, acts of loving kindness, intentional acts of listening, truth telling, making eye contact, putting down the smartphone – all of these can rehumanise, restore and uphold the human space. We need holy, unmediated time together.
When we listen to the Spirit in this way, we invite a new imagination to stir among us. New forms of local association may emerge. Forms that make ‘provision for each person to have a hand in shaping and benefiting from the material and social conditions under which they live and work.’ This is how Luke Bretherton describes the Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain’s vision of Christian humanism. Maritain saw local democratic forms of association ‘as a vital means through which humans can realise their true natures as those created in the image of God.’65
Whether around local mutual aid, sport, entertainment, care of the vulnerable, energy, land or housing, such grassroots collaborations can develop into forms of economy that, embedded in local relationships, have greater resilience.
As Wendell Berry puts it: ‘an economy genuinely local and neighbourly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.’66
Small and local forms of Christian social action offer possibilities too. Food banks, community hubs, pantries and social supermarkets, night shelters, Places of Welcome, credit unions and churches of all shapes and sizes, when connected, hold the promise of an interconnected energy greater than the sum of their parts. But to be truly transformational, models of ownership need to change.
Churches are well-placed, to help poor and working class communities forge mutually beneficial relationships between, for example, charitable food provision and farming communities. The challenge is to discover ways that extend beyond charity to local production; to nurture the latent potential of a truly participatory grassroots economy that is owned and run by the people themselves.
This era calls for a relational church.67 For local Christian communities to be constructive partners, living a shared life with neighbours on low incomes. Sharing each other’s joys, hopes and tragedies, acting together to build a place where our children can make a life. We are all missionary disciples now,68 called to join in the restorative work of the Holy Spirit in our neighbourhoods. The times call for a new formation and an ancient discipleship: to seek the welfare of the city.
But there is a deeper reason why Christians are called to live in solidarity with people trapped in poverty. Pope Francis says the Church needs to be evangelised by the poor.69 Why does he say this? He says that people who are poor tend to have retained a common sense, a sense of their need for others that the affluent and the busy so easily lose. Without them, Christians will misread the signs of the times. Recognising the cost of mission drift, Francis sees that relationships of mutuality and reciprocity with poor communities will keep the Church grounded in truth and close to God.
My conclusion is simple yet challenging. This time of interregnum could be an inflection point for the churches. I want to honour the energy that Faith in the City generated, its many fruits and its legacy. But I sense that another such report may not deliver what is hoped for. What is needed now is an examination of conscience, and then a quiet but determined revolution.
Jenny Sinclair is Founder and Director of Together for the Common Good, a charity dedicated to spiritual and civic renewal. Drawing on Catholic Social Thought, T4CG resources Christian leaders and churches across all denominations, as well as schools and charities, to read the signs of the times and play their part for the common good. She writes and speaks about the vocation of the church in society, and is co-host of Leaving Egypt, a transatlantic podcast exploring what it means to be God’s people in times of unravelling. Daughter of the late David Sheppard, Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, Jenny was received into the Catholic Church in 1988.
This article was first published in Celebrating Forty Years of Faith in the City published by Sacristy Press (2025). Edited by Terry Drummond and Joseph Forde. Contributors: Terry Drummond, Joseph Forde, Angus Ritchie, Jenny Sinclair, David Walker, Averil Pooten Watan, Alan Billings, Andrew Bradstock, Sophie Valentine Cowan, Ian K Duffield, Susan Lucas, John Perambalath. The Paperback is available for £9.99 here.
Footnotes
Together for the Common Good, ‘Our History’, Together for the Common Good. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/about/our-history (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Together for the Common Good, ‘Common Good Thinking’, Together for the Common Good. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/about/common-good-thinking (accessed on 31st December 2024).
I am using the term “Church” to refer to all the churches unless specified otherwise.
D. Sheppard, Bias to the Poor, (Hodder & Stoughton Religious, 1983)
‘The Preferential Option for the Poor’ is a key principle in CST. Reflected in canon law, it is regarded as a true Catholic obligation. Following the biblical preference given to powerless individuals who live on the margins of society, the tradition includes spiritual as well as material poverty, and encompasses all who are marginalized by poverty. See Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006), (#182-184).
John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, encyclical letter, Vatican website, 14 September 1981, #14. Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Francis, Message of His Holiness Pope Francis For The 2023 World Day Of The Poor, Vatican website, 19 November 2023. Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/poveri/documents/20230613-messaggio-vii-giornatamondiale-poveri-2023.html (accessed on 31st December 2024).
. Blagden, W. Tanner, F. Krasniqi, ‘The Age of Alienation: loneliness among young people’, Onward, July 8, 2021. Available at: https://www.ukonward.com/reports/age-of-alienation-loneliness-young-people/ (accessed on 31st December 2024).
J. Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, (Penguin, 2024).
D. Goodhart, Head Hand Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century (Allen Lane, 2020).
Francis, Address of Pope Francis, Pastoral Visit to Prato and Florence, Vatican website, 10 November 2015. Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/november/documents/papa-francesco_20151110_firenze-convegno-chiesa-italiana.html (accessed on 31st December 2024). A similar statement can be found in paragraph 44 of the Concluding Document of the 2007 General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, colloquially known as the Aparecida Document, authored by Pope Francis, then Cardinal Bergoglio. Available at: https://www.scribd.com/document/257681153/General-Conference-of-the-Bishops-of-Latin-America-and-the-Caribbean-concluding-document (accessed on 31st December 2024).
A. Pabst, ‘How Christian is Post-liberalism?’, Together for the Common Good. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/leading-thinkers/how-christian-is-postliberalism (accessed on 31st December 2024).
W. Streeck, ‘Globalism Against Democracy’, Compact Magazine (2024). Available at: https://www.compactmag.com/article/globalism-against-democracy/# (accessed on 31st December 2024).
House of Commons Library, Managed migration: Completing Universal Credit rollout (December 2024). Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9984/ (accessed on 31st December 2024).
L.Bruni, The Genesis and Ethos of the Market (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
P. Kingsnorth, ‘Being Church in the Age of the Machine’ (2024), Leaving Egypt Podcast.
Francis, Fratelli Tutti, encyclical letter, Vatican website, 3 October 2020 (#206, #273). Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html (accessed on 31st December 2024).
A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Intl Pub Co Inc, 1971).
T. Wray, ‘An Economy of Land Rooted in the Local’ (2023), Leaving Egypt Podcast. Available at: LeavingEgypt.com (accessed on 31st December 2024).
John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, encyclical letter, Vatican website, 1 May, 1991 (#41). Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Homily at the Missa Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice at Vatican City, 18 April 2005. Available at: https://www.benedictusxvi.com/homilies/the-dctatorship-of-relativism-and-the-measure-of-true-humanism (accessed 20 January, 2025).
Francis, Address of Pope Francis to the G7 Session on Artificial Intelligence, Vatican website, 14 June 2024. Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2024/june/documents/20240614-g7-intelligenza-artificiale.html (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Francis, G7 Session, 2024.
M. Glasman, ‘Why only Socialism can redeem Conservatism’, Oakeshott Lecture Series 2024. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/leading-thinkers/blue-labour-why-only-socialism-can-redeem-conservatism (accessed on 31st December 2024).
A. Bastani, ‘Labour and the Tories are Becoming a Uniparty’, Unherd. Available at: https://unherd.com/newsroom/labour-and-the-tories-are-becoming-a-uniparty/ (accessed on 31st December 2024).
D. Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2017).
J. Rutherford, ‘The New Class War’ (interview with Michael Lind, 7 January 2023), The New Statesman. Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/01/us-political-analyst-michael-lind-interview-new-class-war (accessed on 31st December, 2024).
J. Rutherford, ‘The New Class War’ (interview with Michael Lind, 2023).
J. Gray, ‘On The Dusk Of Western Liberalism’, (interview, 3 March 2023), Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish.
A. Rowlands, ‘Catholics and the General Election’, (webinar, 18 April 2024) The Tablet and Pastoral Review. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair/catholic-social-teaching-and-the-general-election (accessed on 31st December 2024).
B. Ungar-Sargon, ‘MAGA Must Defeat DOGE’, Compact Magazine (January 20th, 2025). Available at https://www.compactmag.com/article/maga-must-defeat-doge/ (accessed on January 20th, 2025).
Sr H. Alford OP, ‘Just Peace: On Social Peace and the Causes of Division’, Together for the Common Good. Available at: https://t4cg.substack.com/p/lincoln-lecture-series-ep09-just (accessed on 31st December, 2024).
Gmaj Center, ‘The Mitzvah of Lending’, Gmaj Center. Available at: https://gmajcenter.org/in/mitzva.php (accessed on 31st December 2024).
J. Cruddas, The Dignity of Labour (Polity, 2021)
Francis, Message of His Holiness Pope Francis For The Sixth World Day Of The Poor, Vatican website, 13 November 2022, (#7). Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/poveri/documents/20220613-messaggio-vi-giornatamondiale-poveri-2022.html (accessed on 31st December 2024).
C. Miller, ‘A Personal Church for the Common Good’, Together for the Common Good. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/stories/a-personal-church-for-the-common-good (accessed on 31st December 2024).
D.E. Oakman, The Radical Jesus, The Bible and the Great Transformation, (Cascade Books, 2021).
“Synodal” here refers to the Roman Catholic practice of synodality, “journeying together with the Holy Spirit”. See School for Synodality. Available at: https://www.schoolforsynodality.org.uk/our-resources/conversations-in-the-spirit-a-how-to-guide (accessed on 31st December 2024).
A.J. Roxburgh, Joining God in the Great Unraveling: Where We Are & What I’ve Learned (Cascade Books, 2021).
Joseph Rowntree Foundation, ‘UK Poverty 2024: The essential guide to understanding poverty in the UK’, (2024), Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Available at: https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2024-the-essential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk (accessed on 31st December 2024).
J. Bartholomew, ‘The Food Bank Paradox’ (2020), Prospect. Available at: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/40841/the-food-bank-paradox (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Francis, Homily Of His Holiness Pope Francis For The World Day Of The Poor, Vatican website, 14 November 2021, (#7). Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2021/documents/20211114-omelia-giornatamondiale-poveri.html (accessed on 31st December 2024).
G. Smith, ‘Is there still faith in the city?’, William Temple Foundation. Available at: https://williamtemplefoundation.org.uk/is-there-still-faith-in-the-city/ (accessed on 31st December 2024).
M. Glasman, ‘Why only Socialism can redeem Conservatism’, 2024.
J. Kuhrt, ‘Grace, Truth and the Common Good: The Future of Christian Social Action’ (2024), Together for the Common Good. Available at: https://t4cg.substack.com/p/the-2024-series-ep02-grace-truth (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, encyclical letter, Vatican website, 29 June 2009, #57. Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html (accessed on 31st December 2024).
J. Sinclair, ‘Rebuilding the Broken Body’ (2017), The Tablet. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/stories/rebuilding-the-broken-body (accessed on 31st December 2024).
J. Gray, ‘‘Welcome to the Era of Tragic Realism’ (Interview, 2022), Unherd. Available at: https://unherd.com/newsroom/john-gray-welcome-to-the-era-of-tragic-realism/ (accessed on 31st December 2024).
John Paul II, Address by the Holy Father John Paul II for 17th World Youth Day, Vatican website, July 27, 2002. Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/2002/july/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20020727_wyd-vigil-address.html (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Together for the Common Good, ‘One-to-One Conversations’, Together for the Common Good. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/resources/one-to-one-conversations (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Lectio divina is the Ignatian practice of dwelling and discernment with scripture. It is part of my daily routine.
M. Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (Chelsea Green Publishing UK, 2022)
Francis, World Day of The Poor letter, 2023.
Francis, Address to the G7 Session, 2024.
I. Geary, Place: personal, prophetic and political’, Together for the Common Good. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/stories/place-personal-prophetic-and-political (accessed on 31st December 2024).
J. Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology) (Routledge, 2003).
A. Rumsey, ‘Modernity’s Mistake’ (2022), Together for the Common Good. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/stories/learning-from-modernitys-mistake (accessed on 31st December 2024).
A. Milbank, ‘Home for Good’ (2021), Together for the Common Good. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/leading-thinkers/home-for-good (accessed on 31st December 2024).
M. Robinson, The Place of the Parish: Imagining Mission in our Neighbourhood (SCM Press, 2020).
J. Sinclair, ‘Immigration and the Common Good’ (2024), Trinity Forum. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair/immigration-and-the-common-good (accessed on 31st December 2024).
F. Field, Contract Welfare: Back to Basics in The Future of Welfare (2014), Theos. Available at https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/cmsfiles/archive/files/Reports/The%20future%20of%20welfare%20a%20theos%20collection%20combined.pdf (accessed 31st December, 2024).
L. Bruni and S. Zamagni, Civil Economy: Another Idea of the Market (Agenda Publishing, 2016).
See the Common Good Schools programme by Together for the Common Good at
https://commongoodschools.co.uk (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 2020.
L. Bretherton, ‘The Conversion of Public Intellectuals’, Comment Magazine. Available at: https://comment.org/the-conversion-of-public-intellectuals/ (accessed on 31st December 2024).
W. Berry, It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays (ed. Counterpoint, 2012).
J. Sinclair, ‘The Relational Church’, Together for the Common Good, 2023. Available at: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair/the-relational-church (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, encyclical letter, Vatican website, 3 October 2020, (#120). Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html (accessed on 31st December 2024).
Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 2020, (#198).