Thought for the Day

13 FEB 26

12 FEB 26

Good Morning, In the rushed attempt to reckon with the Epstein files and what they mean, it’s become hard to hear from and easy to forget the women who were actually the victims of his crimes. But if we are serious about understanding the forces that lie behind a network in which women and girls were trafficked for sex, we’d surely do well to start with the witness of their victims. Whenever these women have spoken, it is striking how eloquent they are, not just about what has happened to them, but also about the huge challenge of bringing the perpetrators of these crimes to justice. Many of them point to the heroism of Virginia Giuffre who, against massive intimidation and, according to other survivors, the cost of her life, helped to start the process that brought these crimes to light. In her memoir - Nobody’s Girl – she wrote, ‘I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected, victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else.’ I read her book whilst researching a story for an opera about modern slavery. As part of my research, I interviewed a woman who had been trafficked for sex alongside the policewoman who had rescued her from the trafficking gang. ‘Not once in 30 years of law enforcement,’ the policewoman said, ‘did I meet a pimp or sex trafficker who expressed remorse. They see women as product in a business transaction.’ Her words chimed with Giuffre’s insight that we live in a culture that ‘tells girls their primary worth is to appeal to men,’ mere objects to discard once used. Their humanity redacted. This thinking infects the Epstein files where women and girls, some reportedly as young as nine, are offered as though they were meat on a menu. They do this without shame and an entitled belief that the rules don’t apply to them. The Psalmist describes this: ‘In their own eyes they flatter themselves too much to detect their sin. Even on their beds they plot evil; commit themselves to a sinful course and do not reject what is wrong.’ Virginia Giuffre wanted to live in a world where victims were treated with compassion; not compassion as sympathy, but as a radical form of criticism, that says, ‘this hurt is to be taken seriously; it’s not normal; and we have to act.’ In his ministry Jesus sided and stood with the abused and the used. His compassion for the victim was an implicit critique of the system, forces and ideologies that produces victims. At his execution, he entered into that hurt and even came to embody it. On the cross his silence is eloquence. He redacts himself and becomes the Victim God; a witness to, and reckoning with, corrupt and controlling power. One common theme is the total lack of remorse and sense of entitlement.

Good Morning. ‘Speak about hope:’ I hear those words everywhere in these frightening times At synagogue, we’ve just read the Ten Commandments, beginning with ‘I am your God.’ Two rabbis whose teachings I admire experienced those words very differently. The struggle for hope lies in the tension between their explanations. Hugo Gryn, whose warm voice, often heard on radio, I hugely miss, survived Auschwitz. He wrote: Auschwitz-Birkenau was the … perversion of all the Ten Commandments… God was replaced by a Fuehrer and his minions who claimed for themselves the power of life and death… Murder was at the heart of that culture and killers were promoted and honoured… That’s what ‘I am your God’ reminded him of. Nazism is gone, but tyranny, killing and contempt are at large in our world, threatening our freedoms and future. Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger, who died last century, intuited a very different voice in the Commandments. He wrote: When God said, ‘I am,’ the world fell silent; every living being listened. They heard the words not from Heaven, but within themselves. They felt: “This is about who I truly am. The life-force which flows through everything is speaking to me.” In that moment, a deep awareness connected all existence, humans, animals, every breathing being, and cruelty and hatred vanished. I believe that may be what we feel when humbled by some act of kindness; when touched by closeness to another person; when silenced by listening to the birds; when we sense in woodlands: ‘These trees – some hidden life-force connects us.’ A consciousness infinitely greater than ‘Me, me, me,’ flows through us then. It’s what Wordsworth called: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.Here lies a quiet, but powerful, antidote to the horror Rabbi Gryn was forced to experience, when tyrants replaced god, dictating who must live or die. Here is an understanding that motivates us to love and give. I think of my Israeli friend, who despite the violence afflicting both peoples, supported her Palestinian colleague who bravely made soup in Gaza for hungry children. I’m mindful of the Ukrainian grandma, since killed, who refused to leave her front-line home in Kherson and, despite the bombing, sent me a gift of honey. What makes people do that? I believe it’s the deeper voice that calls us, beyond all differences and hatreds, to care for each other and our world. In that voice lies our hope.

09 FEB 26

07 FEB 26

Good morning. When we talk about justice, we picture punishment, verdicts delivered, sentences pronounced, the drama of a courtroom. We talk less about what justice is for, what kind of life it is meant to make possible. I’ve been thinking about that because I’ve just finished jury service. For days I sat with eleven strangers, reminded how fragile justice is, how much it depends on ordinary people listening carefully, trying to hold someone else’s story without breaking it. The law, up close, feels less like marble and more like human breath. That experience drew me back to Rose Heilbron, a woman from Liverpool and one of the great figures of British legal history. My own family comes from that same stretch of Liverpool, and I imagine what it meant for girls like my mother to see someone who sounded a little like them taking her seat in the Old Bailey. Her career was marked by remarkable firsts: among the first women appointed King’s Counsel, the first to lead a murder prosecution, the first woman judge at the Old Bailey. By simply being there, she changed who Britain believed could speak with authority. Her most lasting contribution came in the 1970s when she chaired a committee on the treatment of women reporting rape and sexual assault. It argued that complainants’ identities should be protected and their sexual history not used to discredit them. Behind those reforms lay a conviction: justice cannot function if it humiliates the wounded. A system that deters the vulnerable from coming forward manufactures silence. That conviction feels close this week. Recently released court documents in the United States again exposed how wealth and influence enabled the abuse of women and girls, perpetrators and collaborators protected with a vigour the victims’ could only dream of. Jewish tradition teaches that law exists to guard human dignity – kevod habriyot. The Bible warns: do not oppress the stranger, “for you know the soul of the stranger.” The rabbis understood the stranger as anyone made small by power, anyone whose story can be turned against them. Rose Heilbron’s work lived inside that teaching. She understood that a courtroom should be a place where shame changes sides, where those exposed are finally covered, and those who abused power stand in the light. Perhaps that is what justice is for: not the last word of a story, but the first breath after a long holding of breath –a fragile peace in which the vulnerable are believed, and the rest of us are changed by having listened. Because a society is judged not only by how it punishes the guilty, but by how carefully it guards those who risk everything to speak.

05 FEB 2026

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31 JAN 26

Thursday night saw a glitzy premiere at Windsor Castle, complete with film stars on the red carpet. But rather than a Hollywood blockbuster or homegrown movie, this was the launch of a documentary by the King. Called Finding Harmony, it will be released next week. It is being promoted as the King’s vision for the planet, while the head of the king’s charity, the King’s Foundation, says it is about his philosophy of harmony. While the documentary explores the King’s well-known love of nature and his thoughts on the future of the planet, his interest in the philosophy of harmony is perhaps not so well-known. Yet it is something that he has been mulling over for decades. A whole section of a two-volume set of his speeches is devoted to harmony, what he calls “a grammar” that underscores, art, architecture and spirituality of all the great religions. He spoke about this harmony in a speech at the UN climate change conference COP28 in late 2023. There’s a moment in the documentary which shows the then Prince Charles joking that people thought his ideas were “dotty”, “It was sandals and long hair”, he said. But the idea of harmony owes its origins to ancient Greek and Christian thinking. In a speech he gave in 2015 in Louisville, Kentucky, Prince Charles urged people to develop joined-up thinking about interdependent relationships within nature. “The ancient Greek word for the process of joining things up was Harmonia”, he said, “so joined-up thinking needs to create harmony”. This idea of harmony is evident in Plato’s work, The Timaeus, where he describes the cosmos as a collection of elements arranged in musical ratios and this internal harmony ensures its survival, while St Ambrose, one of the earliest Christian writers saw the creation of the world, described in the Book of Genesis, as a narrative about harmony with a balance between the elements. He saw the way voices are lifted in harmony as symbolising the greater harmony of God’s creation. Someone else who, like the King, expressed concern at a lack of harmony in the way people live now, was Pope Francis. In his major work on the environment, Laudato Si, he warned that humanity’s arrogance in attempting to dominate planet Earth had upset the balance of creation. “The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations”, he wrote. In other words, if there is any chance of the joined-up thinking the King calls for in our relationship with one another and with nature, a starting point for harmony needs to be humility.

29 JAN 26

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27 JAN 26

26 JAN 2026

Places where strangers become friends Good morning. The pub in Oxford last week looked its usual, amazing self. I’d been doing a bit of teaching and was staying in a nearby college overnight. Outside was dark, cold and wet. But as I pushed the pub door open, I was met with a warm, candlelit cacophony of conversation. People were eating supper, playing board games, reading books. It was a glorious, uplifting sight. We know that, for decades now, pub landlords have been facing multiple challenges in order simply to keep their doors open. In 2025, the equivalent of one pub a day in England and Wales had to close its doors permanently. So it was good this week to hear Prince William talking about how much he loves everything a pub has to offer and urging us to do all we can to support our local. Pubs, he said, are the beating heart of many communities, where we can meet with friends and neighbours.2 Along with churches and other places of worship, many of which are also reimagining themselves simply to survive, pubs provide a radical alternative to the social isolation and loneliness affecting many groups in society. I observe this more and more in the course of my own work. Often unseen, people of all ages and backgrounds can unwittingly find themselves alone, without the meansor motivation to find a non-transactional space where they can simply “be” with other people. Many community cafes are also thriving like never before. Christian theology has always celebrated hospitality. The Bible stresses the importance of people being together to meet as well as sharing food and drink. This is something Jesus is also frequently found doing in the gospels as he meets with an interesting range of people. St Paul, whose feast day the Church celebrates tomorrow, wrote many letters to the early Church, stressing not only the importance of worship but also the spiritual benefits that fellowship with others brings. He regards this as an important ingredient towards spiritual renewal and happiness. For centuries pubs have been at the centre of British culture. The Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc warned - “when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.” They've left their mark throughout literature, in Orwell and Dickens, Dylan Thomas and Chaucer. His pilgrims began their journey to Canterbury at the Tabard Inn! As modern-day pilgrims, navigating an ever-complex world of conundrums and challenges [wherever our final destination might be] preserving spaces for conversation and friendship, where strangers can become friends, is surely an imperative.

“You’ve failed.” Words spoken to me by a man with a clipboard, in a Renault Clio back in 1997. Failing my driving test seems trivial now, from the misty vantage point of nearly thirty years distance, but at age seventeen these were devastating words to hear. The unpleasant sting of failure is a lingering memory; the embarrassment, increasing with each friend calling to say they had passed. The sense of inadequacy. The desperation and the increasing certainty that I would never, ever pass myself. Such is the stigma and social detriment of failure that some people will resort to nefarious means in order to pass. Cheating on driving tests has increased by nearly 50% over the past year; a dangerous form of deception which risks lives, and also severs the social contract which relies on us all following the rules in order to be safe. Failure is key both to character building and communal ethics. The biblical record is littered with examples of human failure, and those who tried everything to avoid it. The Trickster is a common narrative trope, which includes a disreputable collection of characters who cheat and lie in order to succeed rather than risk the disgrace of failure. Abram who persuades Sarai to pose as his sister to dupe Pharoah. Laban who uses deception to ensnare Jacob into working longer for him. Rebekah, the trickster architect of the plan to fool Isaac into blessing her younger son Jacob over his brother Esau. These cheats appear to prosper, at least momentarily, in a moral universe which allowed deception, but the biblical record shows that their ethical misdeeds often came back to haunt them. Jacob, for example, so quick to be part of his mother’s schemes, ended up being deceived himself, tricked into marrying the wrong woman. The book of Proverbs says that food gained by fraud tastes sweet, but one ends up with a mouth full of gravel. So it was for our biblical tricksters, whom God used to work out his divine purposes - not because God loves a cheater, but because God loves those who fail. It is in the failing and the striving and the trying again that we learn our best lessons. Elizabeth Day has written that “if you’ve survived it, failure has taught you something.” I finally passed my driving test, but it was in the failure to do so that I learned how to be a good driver. The taste of failure is bitter indeed, hard to swallow and takes a long time to uncomfortably digest, but it’s what feeds our character and helps us to grow, and however horrible it tastes, at least it’s not gravel.

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