The New Jerusalem: Building a Vision for the Common Good?

Taken from Greenbelt keynote book, Reclaiming the Common Good, Simon Woodman says to start with we need to consider what, in the world, we might be here for ...

There is an important question to be asked, when it comes to considering a properly Christian response to the common good, and it is this: ‘What, in the world, are we here for?’

There is a long trajectory of Christian engagement with philosophies of ‘common good’; from the medieval Church’s appropriation of Aristotelian concepts, to the development of Catholic Social Thought in the twentieth century. Of particular interest is the question of whether the Church’s common good correlates with the common good of wider society beyond the Church, and of how these ‘goods’ relate to the self-interest of the individuals who comprise the Christian community. In other words, ‘What, in the world, are we here for?’

As with all interesting and important questions, this bears a little unpacking. Specifically, who might be referred to as ‘we’ here? Is it to be heard as applying to individual Christian believers, querying the purpose of personal existence? Or is it to be heard as applying to people at a congregational level, asking a collective group of Christians why they gather in their particular building, in their particular location? Or maybe it should be heard in a wider sense than this, perhaps as applicable to the Church universal, asking what the point is of Christian churches in general? Or maybe it should be heard at an existential level, as applying to all of humanity and asking what, if anything, is the point of human life itself? All of these are valid questions, and subsumed within them are whole disciplines of philosophy, ethics, ecclesiology and theology. So perhaps it might be helpful to narrow it down for the purposes of our enquiry into the common good. I’m going to suggest that it should be heard as being primarily directed at the Church in its universal sense – ‘Why is there a church in the world?’, and then secondarily as applying to the church at a congregational level – ‘Why is this church here in this corner of the world?’

So, ‘What, in the world, are we here for?’

There is an old cliché that the Bible starts with a vision of a garden and ends with a vision of a city; and this can be a helpful way of thinking about the trajectory that Scripture takes, with its rollercoaster journey from a one vision of perfection to another, encompassing the vast sweep of human experience along the way. But another way of thinking about the Bible is that it is an attempt to explore, through story and history, through poetry and parable, what the purpose might be for God having called some people to be his people. This question of purpose is there in the moment of revelation given to Abraham, the spiritual ancestor of Jews, Muslims and Christians. In that moment of initial calling, the covenant that God made with Abraham was that his descendants would be the people of God, and that they would be a blessing to the whole earth (Genesis 12:1–9; 17:1–8). The purpose of calling one group of humans into a relationship with God was, from the beginning, that the blessing should go beyond that group. The outworking of this is surely that any form of religion that seeks to keep the blessings of their relationship with God to themselves and those like them is a betrayal of the covenant that God made with Abraham.

So, the first part of an answer to the question of, ‘What, in the world, are we here for?’, has to be that, at the very least, the Church is here to be good news to those who live beyond its own community. It is here to be good news to the lost, the lonely and the least; to be good news to those who are not like ‘us’. Which brings us to the main point for this chapter: I propose that the Church (universal and local) is here, in this world, to build a vision for the common good.

Those who built the Tower of Babel were trying to build their way to heaven (Genesis 11:1–9), while those who built the tabernacle were trying to build a home for God on earth (Exodus 25:8–9). Solomon built his temple to keep God close to the seat of royal power (1 Kings 7:51), while Ezra rebuilt it as a symbol of ethnic exclusivity (Ezra 4:3). But all these attempts to build the Kingdom of God on earth ultimately failed, and the lesson from these stories is that God can neither be reached by human efforts, nor contained by human buildings. The good news of the New Testament witness is that God is encountered on earth, not through a sacred building or a tower of strength, but through the person of Jesus as he is revealed by his Spirit, through the people that bear his name. If the Church in the contemporary world is to think of itself as those people through whom Jesus is revealed, then the reason the Church is ‘here’ is not to build God a house, or to build power or strength, but to build a vision for the common good. The Church is here to be a blessing to those who are not part of it, to be ‘good news’ to all people. The Church is called to social evangelicalism, whose ‘good news’ is heard across all sectors and sections of society. Jonathan Chaplin proposes that while other religious traditions such as Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism have developed profound theologies of the common good, the evangelical tradition has largely failed to do this, resulting in a sparsity of theological resources for evangelicals to articulate a vision for an alternative reality in anything other than spiritualised terms.¹ He notes that this has not prevented significant examples of evangelical social activism (such as the ‘nonconformist conscience’ of the nineteenth century), but that neither have these examples rooted themselves deep within the evangelical tradition. He locates the more recent recovery of evangelical social activism within the context of a sense of loss at the passing of ‘the Christian country’. The desire to return to a nationalist narrative of Christian-inspired legislation is thus identified by Chaplin as a ‘neo-Christendom assumption’² which interprets the role of the Church in national affairs as defending against the erosion of Christian privilege. By this model, it is Christians themselves who become the vulnerable and the weak, and in need of legal protection; as opposed to a vision of the common good where the Church is concerned with giving voice and protection to those others whom society would exclude or disadvantage. Against this, Chaplin points to theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder, who have articulated a vision of the church as a radical alternative economic community, modelling a distinct vision of humanity focused around the teachings of Jesus. However, Chaplin’s critique of this latter movement is that it encourages its adherents to ‘work apart from the world, for the sake of the world’.³ In other words, it is isolationist in its desire to be countercultural. This raises once again the question of what, in the world, is the Church for?

An answer may be discerned in the fascinating vision of the Church on the earth found in the biblical image of the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21:2). Many readers of this image have taken it as a vision of the future, something that will happen at some point far from now as a mysterious celestial city descends from the heavens to settle on a renewed earth. This is no mere theological abstraction, because if a Christian comes to believe that this present earth is going to go (quite literally) to hell, to be replaced in God’s good time by a new earth and a new city for the purified elect to live in, then they have very little motive to act in ways that build the common good in the present. In some prominent streams of evangelicalism in the USA and elsewhere, it is not uncommon to find Christians so focused on heaven and the future that they will vote for politicians in the present whose policies are contrary to the common good.

In the light of this observation, I want to offer the image of the new Jerusalem as a model for Christian engagement in building a vision for the common good. If the new Jerusalem were merely a vision of the distant future, then one might reasonably ask what earthly use it is now for those who must live in the present? My contention is that it is much more likely that what the book of Revelation is offering here is a metaphor for the Church militant; a compelling picture which invites further reflection as to what it might mean to be the Church in the here-and-now, in this time and this place. By this understanding, the new Jerusalem is a picture of the people of God on the earth, a symbolic image designed to address the question of what, on earth, the Church is here for.

Consider the utility supplies in the new Jerusalem; specifically the supply of light and water. The text states that the city has no need for either the natural lights of the sun and the moon, or for the artificial light that comes from lamps (Revelation 21:22–26). Rather, the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb of God. In fact, it has so much light that it shines brightly enough for all the nations to walk by its light. Similarly, the new Jerusalem seems to have a never-ending supply of fresh water, enough not only for its own citizens, but to quench the thirst of anyone who wishes to come and take the water of life as a gift (Revelation 22:17). This super-abundance of light and water is in stark contrast to all other human cities. The ancient city of Jerusalem itself had no natural water supply, and until relatively outside the walls (2 Kings 20:20). Similarly, the supply of light to keep city streets safe at night was, until the invention of electricity and gas supplies, dependent on lamps and oil; as reflected in Jesus’ famous parable about the virgins and their oil lamps (Matthew 25:1–13).

This consideration of light and water supplies introduces the concept of the economics of the common good. In any city, and in any society, there are certain things that it will make more sense to enact collectively. The lighting of the streets is a classic example, although the principle can be extrapolated across many areas of need and provision. The significant thing about street lights is that no one street light exclusively benefits any one individual. The system only works when all the lights are working for the benefit of all the inhabitants. It would make no sense to try and levy a charge on citizens only for the light they actually used, or to arrange to illuminate only the part of the pavement that someone was currently walking along. Similarly, one person’s use of the light does not materially detract from any other person’s use. This, in a nutshell, is the economics of the common good. The same is true of water supplies, sewage systems, public transport, and health care provision, to name but a few further examples.

Enlightened rulers down the centuries have sought to implement policies for the common good, from the building of Roman aqueducts to the health care and welfare reforms of the modern era. However, the difficulty such leaders have faced is that to do this requires a clear initial vision of the end result, in order that the bold economic steps to construct and offer a service for all, regardless of need or level of use, can be justified politically. For policies to be enacted for the common good, there first has to be a clear vision for the common good; and one of the key weaknesses of neoliberal capitalism has been that its driving vision has been towards the good of the individual, rather than for the good of all. The emphasis on free trade, privatisation, deregulation and fiscal austerity have, at best, placed the common good as a secondary function of the overarching vision of personal self-interest. Those who retain a hope for communitarian economics might well wonder where, in the twenty-first century, voices offering a coherent vision for the common good will emerge.

The image of the new Jerusalem as the city with enough light to shine across all the nations, and with enough water to supply the thirst of any who need it, invites a deeply politicised reflection on the Church’s understanding of itself, in the world for the common good. ‘What, in the world, are we here for?’ We’re here for the good of all; in fulfilment of the covenant between God and Abraham. This is a spiritual vision, but it is a vision with some very practical out-workings. All too often churches have come to see themselves as existing in the world for their own benefit, with the Church in effect functioning as a closed-set club, admission upon request. Any benefits such churches offer to the wider world are often secondary, at best. The primary purpose of such club-churches may vary, from the basic Christian social church, to groups drawn together around a particular understanding of a theological issue, to single-issue churches focusing on anything from a specific style of music to a distinctive architectural style; but in all these the core operating principle remains the same. Too often the Church has adopted an individualistically centred approach to its existence in the world, rather than one which is focused beyond the primary church community. The Church has invented itself in the image of society, rather than seeing itself as existing in fulfilment of a covenant of universal benefit. At one level there’s nothing wrong with these concerns; social interaction is a gift of grace, theological issues do matter, as do music and architecture; but there remains a significant problem with neoliberal-club-churches, which is that they primarily exist for the benefit of their own members. They build for themselves, rather than for the common good.

Many of the buildings we call churches exist because congregations have decided to build themselves a home. From parish church to nonconformist chapel, these structures provide somewhere for the people of God to come and worship their God. Those who attend tend to think of them as ‘our church’, where ‘we’ come to meet with God, encountering him in the sanctuary ‘we’ have built for him. However, this is not true of all church buildings. The great Methodist Mission churches of the London suburbs were built to offer transformation in the poorest and most deprived areas of the Victorian city, promoting the temperance movement in the face of the evils of alcohol addiction, and supporting the suffragette cause for the emancipation of women. They were built for the common good. Similarly, the church where I am privileged to minister in Central London was built not just to house a congregation who come to worship God on the Lord’s day, but to be a place of Baptist mission to the centre of the city. The building was strategically placed on the boundary between wealth and poverty, between the squares of Bloomsbury and the slums of St Giles, with the express intention of bringing the two together in ways that would transform the city for good. In a different way, the Anglican/Roman Catholic parish system has at its heart the conviction that the church is there for the good of the entire parish, not just those who attend worship regularly. All the main traditions of Christianity offer the possibility for their ecclesiology to be brought to the service of the common good, just as they all contain the temptation to restrict themselves to those who consciously identify as part of their community.

The Church in all its forms, therefore, is the heir to a vision to build for the common good, just as it is comprised of the spiritual descendants of Abraham’s vision of the people of God in the world for the blessing of all peoples. The Church is called to be the new Jerusalem, offering light and water to the community beyond the doors of whatever building it has constructed for itself. The question, of course, is what offering light and water might look like in a complex, technological, 24-hour Western society? What does it mean for the contemporary Church to build a vision for the common good? Where is the need in today’s context? What would it mean for the people of God in our time to shine light into the darkest corners of society, exposing the oppressive systems and practices that enslave people’s souls and bodies? What would it mean for the people of God in our context to offer refreshing water to those who are being poisoned by the polluted atmosphere of hatred and cynicism and despair?

Here it may be helpful to hear the word of Jeremiah to the exiles in Babylon. The Babylonians invaded Jerusalem about six hundred years before the time of Jesus, sacked the city and destroyed the temple, before carrying a swathe of the Jewish population into exile in Babylon. It was to these exiles, far from home, with no buildings of their own and no temple in which to worship, that Jeremiah wrote:

‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.’ (Jeremiah 29:4–7 NRSV)

The call of God to those in exile in Babylon was to seek the welfare of the city of Babylon.

In the book of Revelation, where the image of the Church as the new Jerusalem is found, the name ‘Babylon’ is used as a codename for the Roman empire, and the picture the book paints is of the people of God there, in the midst of the Empire, for good, and for the common good. In Revelation’s vision the gates of the new Jerusalem are open, its light shines brightly beyond its own walls, and its pure water is available for all. This is not a vision of the Church battened down, defensively protecting itself while entering survival mode. It is a vision of the Church militant, in the world for the good of all, courageously seeking the welfare of the city. For Babylon, read Rome, read London, read New York, read wherever the people of God are present in the midst of empire.

The people of God are not here, on the earth, called from among the nations, to build a temple in which ‘they’ can worship ‘their God’. The people of God are not here to build a tower of strength, nor to build political power. They are not here to build walls around their communities to keep them safe from those who are not like them. Rather, the people of God are here, in the world, to throw open the doors of their communities, to shine brightly for the benefit of those beyond themselves, and to build a vision for the common good. The people of God are called to seek the welfare of the context to which they have been sent. This is not about building a new building, or even a new community; it’s about building a new world. The people of God are here to learn, together, to see the world differently, to see the world as God sees it, and to speak and live into being an alternative way of being human before God. It is this new world which is light and water to those whose lives are in darkness and whose souls are parched.

It is no coincidence that many of the great welfare projects which dominated the twentieth century in the United Kingdom were born of a Christian vision for the common good, as has been noted by other commentators in this book. One important example of this was the influence of Catholic Social Teaching on the ‘common good’ subsidiarity principles of the European Union, in which each person is understood as connected to and dependent upon each other person. Recent political pressure from certain countries to break apart the EU speaks of a political failure to enact this vision in an embedded way within the nationalistically defined communities of Europe. In a similar way, the influence of Christian charity on the construction of the welfare state needs to be recognised, as does the impact of welfare cuts on the lives of those who might otherwise be in receipt of benefit. The contemporary widespread provision by churches of foodbanks, debt services, and homelessness initiatives are further examples of churches outworking in society the underlying Christian vision for the common good.

However, it should be recognised that there is a tension between a vision for national (or international) structures enacted for the common good, and a vision for localised initiatives that are responsive to immediate need. The first is about building systems of justice, while the second is about responding with mercy. The rise of foodbanks and the like, while at one level representing the Church’s mission to the poor and the needy, also speaks of the failure of those very structures that an earlier generation built to ensure justice and welfare for all. The people of God sit between the local and the national (and indeed the international), and must operate across these spheres as they outwork their vision for the common good. The prophet Micah captures this tension between structural justice and localised mercy: ‘What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God’ (Micah 6:8 NIV). It is not enough to just meet the immediate need, and neither is it enough to focus on enacting national reform. The Church is called to join the two together, for the common good. Virginia Moffatt makes a related point in her chapters above⁴, noting the way in which ‘common good principles’ have shifted from the legislature to the charitable sector, as the financial constraints driven by the neoliberal consensus have combined to reduce the role of the state in ensuring the ‘good’ of its citizens. In this context, Simon Duffy⁵ draws attention to the significance of biblical and Jewish examples of social welfare, before offering some proposals for what a rethought vision for the common good might look like in a contemporary context.

There is a literary device used by the author of the book of Revelation which gives an overall structure to the text. The device is this: he brackets the central visionary dream sequences with the real-world experience of his readers. The book begins with a series of letters addressed to seven churches, firmly rooting all that follows in the first-century context of Asia Minor. Then in chapter 4 he describes an open door into heaven, and steps through that door into the world of the vision (Revelation 4:1). From a rhetorical point of view, John’s readers make the same step with him through the door; and those who keep reading his text find themselves journeying with him through the heavenly realm, encountering fantastical creatures that turn out to be symbolic representations of aspects of their earthly existence. So, for example, the beast and the great prostitute are symbols of the Roman Empire (Revelation 17), while the two faithful witnesses (Revelation 11) are symbolic of the faithful witness of the people of God. Towards the end of the book, John introduces his readers to the image of the new Jerusalem as a depiction of the Church, describing it as the bride of Christ (Revelation 21:9–10). The city descends from the visionary world of the heavens down to the earth of John’s readers, and the rhetorical device introduced in chapter 4 is completed, as the people of God are returned from the pictorial world that they entered with him through the open door, back down to the earth of their lived reality, where they then have to engage the task of living faithfully and witnessing to the cause of the Gospel of Christ.

What the people of God discover is that, after journeying with John through the heavens, they then encounter the world differently. It is, from their perspective, ‘made new’ (21:5), it is a ‘new heaven’ and a ‘new earth’ (21:1). The world which is encountered by those who are ‘new Jerusalem’ is a new context, because it is encountered differently. The old world was one where the emperor was all-powerful and worshipped as a God, where the empire exerted absolute control over its citizens, and where the witness of the people of God was pointless and futile. The new world, which is the world seen through the visionary lens of Revelation, is one where imperial power is finite, where the empire is under judgement, and where the faithful witness of the people of God is the essential factor in the renewal of human society. The new world comes into being as the people of the new Jerusalem bear faithful testimony to the truth that they have seen, and live that truth into being in their midst.

However, the new Jerusalem does not sit easily in Babylon. The earth is not transformed the moment the heavenly city descends. Rather, this is a vision of the people of God as a migrant city of aliens; living in the world, but not of the world; living the new world into being in the heart of the old world, that the world may be transformed. Thus the issue of the relationship between the Church and the world in which it exists is made central to any vision of the Church.

To return to the question with which we started, ‘What, on earth, are we here for?’ The answer surely must be that the people of God are on the earth for the good of the whole earth. However, this assertion flies in the face of much that forms central dogma for many churches. For many Christians, salvation is about saving individuals from the hell that is to come by inviting them to repent of their sins. However, a vision for the common good reframes this understanding of salvation to one where the role of the Church is to save communities from the hells that they create and live under whenever they give free reign to individualistic ideologies. Repentance, by this understanding, becomes a call to the nations to turn away from the destructive ideologies of empire, and to turn towards the alternative way of being human embodied by the people of God, where the other takes precedence over the self. The call to worship Christ becomes a call to embrace the body of Christ, which is encountered as a community of benefit for all. This is a highly politicised understanding of the role of the Church in the world, where personal good is subsumed within common good. The book of Revelation is quite clear that within its visionary world, hell and death are no more, which means that there is no need for people to live their lives in fear of them. Rather, those who turn to Christ are freed to participate in the transformation of the world for good; which will involve challenging and rejecting all competing ideologies of salvation. As Jesus said, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6).

John’s vision of the Church as new Jerusalem, in the world for the common good, extends beyond social justice programmes and political agendas, to embrace the entire created order. The water that flows through the city is described as the ‘river of life’, and John depicts a tree growing beside it which produces fruit all year round; he calls it the ‘tree of life’. He then says that ‘the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations’ (Revelation 22:2). At one level this is a clear reversal of the Genesis ‘fall’ story, where the knowledge of good and evil is described as entering the world through the consumption of the fruit of the tree in Eden (Genesis 3:1–13). However, it is also an image of the people of God, rooted in the world, for the good of the nations. The allusion here is to the trees depicted in the book of Ezekiel (47:6–12), which describes a vision of a world transformed, with the dry and dusty land between Jerusalem and the Jericho brought to life, and the salt waters of the Dead Sea teeming with fish, its barren banks verdant with trees. Ezekiel’s insight, consciously echoed in the book of Revelation, is that the coming of the Kingdom of God involves the transformation of the earth itself; it is about the salvation of all things, and the healing of the nations occurs as part of the process of the healing of creation.

As Ellen Teague notes in her chapter in Reclaiming the Common Good, ‘The threat of the Anthropocene’,⁷ the influence of humanity on the environment is so great that the current geological era might legitimately be regarded as the Anthropocene, with loss of biodiversity and the impacts of climate change affecting irrevocably the ecological systems that sustain life. Any vision for the common good that emerges from Christian theology must therefore speak truth to the powers that determine human environmental impact. As Edward Echlin goes on to observe in his chapter in Reclaiming the Common Good, if there is to be a future, it must be green, with each person respecting the bioregion in which they live.⁸

The creation of the new earth, and the dawning of the new Jerusalem, are therefore not to be understood in terms of successful church growth, nor are they about personal or corporate achievement. Rather, the transformation of the earth comes about, as per Ezekiel’s vision, through the pure clear water which flows from the temple in Jerusalem. It is the people of God themselves who are the source of life to the earth, and the blessing of God flows through them bringing renewal and refreshing to all. This isn’t something that can be manufactured or performed, rather it is the gracious gift of the love of God, who invites his people to discover what it is to be truly loved for who they are, so that others may discover what it is to be truly loved for who they are. It is a call to empathy, and to a holistic understanding of the relationship between creation, creator, and all created beings.

Pope Francis has said:

Indifference to our neighbour and to God … represents a real temptation for us Christians. Usually, when we are healthy and comfortable, we forget about others (something God the Father never does): we are unconcerned with their problems, their sufferings and the injustices they endure … Our heart grows cold. As long as I am relatively healthy and comfortable, I don’t think about those less well off. Today, this selfish attitude of indifference has taken on global proportions, to the extent that we can speak of a globalization of indifference. It is a problem which we, as Christians, need to confront.⁹

The Church, universal and local, is here, on the earth, to be good news for all, to build a vision for the common good. Indeed, one might well observe that if the church fails to articulate heaven’s perspective on the earthly situation, who ‘on earth’ is going to do it?

Simon Barrow,⁹ in his Reclaiming the Common Good article, challenges churches to rediscover a politics that ‘brings people together’, noting that such a call to justice and love will stand in sharp contrast to the divisive rhetoric of the dominant nationalistic political discourse which is driven by ‘disordered globalism’ and ‘unstable financialisation’. The key, for Simon Barrow, lies in a commitment to nonviolence, where the Church mirrors the example of Christ in forging alliances across boundaries, finding friends in unexpected places who will join in the task of building a vision for the common good. Savitri Hensman¹⁰ echoes this call, emphasising the biblical imperative of justice as an injunction to encounter Christ in the poor, the vulnerable and the outcast. The outworking of this is that those who cross boundaries and borders as migrants and asylum seekers are themselves signifiers of the Christ who breaks down the barriers that divide humanity from itself and from encounter with God. It is in this context that Susan Clarkson¹¹ highlights the way in which the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount deconstruct the dominant myth of redemptive violence which has determined so much of the international response to the immigration crisis of recent years.

So in a world of growing fear, with the whiff of fascism in the air, with growing suspicion of the other, and fear of the foreigner, with poverty and homelessness literally on the doorsteps of our churches, with mental health services in crisis at the very point where they are most needed, with social care and security facing cuts of catastrophic levels, maybe this is what, in the world, the Church is here for. It is called to look beyond itself, to take into action the conviction that in Christ every life matters, and that Christ always has a bias to the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalised. The Church is called to build alliances with others, to speak truth to power, and to hold to account those who hold power. It is called to engage politics and charity, to build communities of reciprocity, to run night shelters and day centres, to use its resources to see the marginalised included, the poor lifted up, and the vulnerable made strong.

The Church is therefore called to build a vision for the common good, where the absolute love of God for each and every person is at the heart of all that it does. It should be in and through the Church that utopian religion finds its pragmatic reality; the people of God are where dreams become real and visions get built. They are the outpost on the earth of the new world that that is coming. They are the people who live into being in their midst the reality for which they pray: that the kingdom will come, on earth as it is in heaven.

This is an extract from Reclaiming the Common Good: How Christians can help re-build our broken world, edited by Virginia Moffatt. The book is available in paperback, priced £14.99.

Notes

1. Jonathan Chaplin, ‘Evangelicalism and the language(s) of the common good’ in Nicholas Sagovsky and Peter McGrail (eds), Together for the Common Good: Towards a national conversation (London: SCM Press, 2015), pp. 91–106.

2. Ibid., p. 97.

3. Ibid., p. 102.

4. Virginia Moffatt, ‘Rolling back the state’, ‘Rolling back the market’, in Reclaiming the Common Good (London: DLT, 2017), pp. 85–98 and pp. 99–116 .

5. Simon Duffy, ‘A new vision for welfare?’ in Reclaiming the Common Good (London: DLT, 2017), pp. 71–84.

6. Ellen Teague, ‘The threat of the Anthropocene’, in Reclaiming the Common Good (London: DLT, 2017), pp. 145–57

7. Edward P. Echlin, ‘Living within our bioregion: sharing planet earth’, in this publication, pp. 158–67.

8. Pope Francis’s Lent Message, 2015.

9. Simon Barrow, ‘The uncommon good’, in Reclaiming the Common Good (London: DLT, 2017), pp. 43–55.

10. Savitri Hensman, ‘Crossing boundaries, overcoming barriers’, in Reclaiming the Common Good (London: DLT, 2017), pp. 133–144.

11. Susan Clarkson, ‘For ashes, a garland: embracing’.