“Slow down!” the refrain pleads, “Baby, now you’re movin’ way too fast.” The Fab Four were singing about a love relationship that was getting a little ahead of itself, but their message is good advice for our hectic, fast-paced generation: “Slow down! Don’t get ahead of yourself! Make the most of the moments of your life!” We hear this heart-cry in various ways: “You gotta stop and smell the roses.” “Take it one day at a time.” “Don’t be in such a hurry.”

Human beings seem ever to be rushing to the next event, situation, duty, or meeting. In the process, we take for granted the moments of our lives, seeing them as little more than stepping stones to the next big thing. In the process of rushing through our moments to get to the times that matter, we miss the beauty and truth of much of what is happening around us. And it is precisely here that poetry can help us to slow down and learn to discover the glory of God hidden in our overlooked moments.

One of de Botton’s central ideas is that of an alignment between the visual and ethical realms. That is to say, we find architecture beautiful because it corresponds to our ideas about “the good life.” Beautiful buildings, de Botton suggests, correspond to virtuous and happy people. Of course this is not always the case, nor is it a causal relationship; while architecture may suggest such ideals, it doesn’t necessarily bring them about. De Botton notes, “Not only do beautiful houses falter as guarantors of happiness, they can also [fail] to improve the characters of those who live in them.” While architecture undeniably possesses moral messages, he says, it “simply has no power to enforce them.”

However, de Botton insists that beautiful buildings convey a moral attitude, which recalls the claim of the great nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin that buildings speak to us “both of what we find important and what we need to be reminded of.” De Botton writes that architecture invites us to emulate its spirit, offering values it encourages us to adopt as our own. “It is architecture’s task,” de Botton says, “to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.”

Professor Nigel Biggar presented this talk at a December 2009 event for the Westminster Forum of Trinity Forum Europe. The talk that evening was followed by a response from Lord Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and winner of the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

Among the hill tribes of southern Afghanistan, I am told, talk of forgiveness and reconciliation connotes grubby compromise and dishonour.[1] For many people the issue that ought to arise after conflict is that of justice, even vengeance, not forgiveness and reconciliation. And their point is not merely that justice should have priority, but that talk of forgiveness and reconciliation actually confuses matters and hinders justice.

While some people admired Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s urging victims to embrace perpetrators during the amnesty hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and while they marveled at a process that aspired to reconciliation rather than retribution, others were uneasy and skeptical. The public shows of reconciliation seemed unnatural and forced. And didn’t such forgiveness let the torturers and killers off too lightly? Didn’t it trivialize the terrible wrongs they’d done? Worse, didn’t it triviliase the victims themselves?

At a conference I ran just over ten years ago on Burying the Past after Civil Conflict, we started off talking unselfconsciously about forgiveness and reconciliation, until a young woman, who had been twice imprisoned by the communist authorities in East Germany for dissident activity, stood up. “What on earth are you talking about?”, she said. “What’s all this talk about forgiveness and reconciliation? I now live on the same street as the man who informed on me. I didn’t know him then and I sure as damn don’t want to know him now. What do you mean by ‘reconciliation’?”

Why Forgiveness?

And what do I mean by forgiveness in Northern Ireland? Why do I even raise the matter?

Well, in part, it’s a reflex. I’m a Christian, and the obligation to forgive wrongdoers is a very prominent one in the teaching and example of Jesus. So Christians are pretty much bound to consider what forgiveness requires, when faced with the business of righting wrongs. Talk of forgiveness is not unique to Christianity, of course, but it does seem to be uniquely pronounced there. And I say that, not, I think, out of Christian chauvinism, but on the ground of observations made by a number of Jews—observations that are often more critical than approving.

What are these signs? Where, how and why are they surfacing? They will not be detectable to anyone looking for the magic religion of Woody Allen’s quip, “If only God would give me a clear sign: like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank”.

Maybe this is because banks, like so many other former landmarks of reliability, have become part of tomorrow’s problem. As tomorrow is the age of anxiety it is natural that many people should have begun their own processes of questioning today’s failing certainties. What is being discarded is the aggressive secularism, political correctness and militant materialism of the-me-and-my-bonus mindset. The search is on for deeper meanings, better values, and that “need for something more” which seeks a spiritual dimension to life.

Winter can be unforgiving, especially in a world occupied by both bees and beekeepers. Bees know their job. They organize for it with sublime results. But my job as beekeeper is not without consequence.

One of the true joys of life is that first spoonful of honey following the harvest. But that moment of joy is now two seasons away for me. I could have harvested honey in September, but not without risking the delicate balance that is the crucial natural link in our relationship.

William Wilberforce, once considered an obscure historical figure, has made a comeback in the public consciousness as the leader of efforts he believed God had placed before him as his “two great objects”: the abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners and morals. The almost miraculous accomplishment of both took not only Wilberforce’s lifelong dedication, but also that of a close circle of friends who became known as the Clapham Sect (named after their neighborhood of Clapham). But while it has become increasingly clear that the Clapham Sect was as essential to the British abolitionist movement as Wilberforce, few know much of those who gathered that band of friends.

One such little-known but highly influential figure was Lady Margaret Middleton. In our Reading on Wilberforce, biographer John Pollock writes that “the principal agent in securing Wilberforce” to first offer a motion to Parliament to abolish the slave trade “was Captain Sir Charles Middleton of the royal Navy and his artist wife.” Lady Middleton is worth remembering as one who used her gifts of hospitality, friendship, and a passion for justice to gather for conversation (and later, strategizing) the friends who would become the leading abolitionists of her time.

A mere four years earlier, the narrative was a bit different. The re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 generated a powerful sense of despair in Garry Wills, who, writing for the New York Times, suggested that America was beginning to resemble its “fundamentalist” enemies from the Taliban. Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich pleaded with his readers to prefer science and secular reason to the mystical hopes of the next world. Time magazine wrote up a list of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals, implying that the power of the demographic was growing.

The common thread between these two narratives (of either religious ascendancy or decline) is that American Christianity is a dangerous thing and a socially retrogressive force. When Mr. Obama gained the White House the various endorsers of secularism breathed something of a sigh of relief, as though they had been rescued from some serious threat. On this reading, religion is like white phosphorus. It must be kept submerged lest it ignite. Right-thinking people, we are led to believe, should embrace the cool dispassion of secularism. Indeed, some even argue that Christians need special language rules and guides for public engagement that would instruct us to carefully form secular motives for our civic participation and to expunge all “God-talk” from our political speech.

Senior Fellow Roger Scruton gave this address on 23 June 2009 for Trinity Forum Westminster, a new initiative of Trinity Forum Europe for the Parliamentary and political community in the UK.

In the religions that are familiar to us, the idea of grace is of fundamental importance. The term (Latin gratia) translates a variety of words in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and Sanskrit, but all the sacred texts seem to point in the same direction, affirming that God’s relation to the world as a whole, and to each of us in particular, is one of giving. God’s grace (as contained in the person and acts of his Son) is acknowledged in the liturgy of the Anglican Church, when we say together ‘the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us now and evermore’. The great prayer of the Catholic Church, based on a poem in the New Testament, greets the Virgin Mary with the words ‘Hail Mary, full of Grace, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’ The Koran opens with the verse that forms a refrain in the life of all Muslims: bism illah il-rahman il-rahim, in the name of God, full of grace, full of graciousness, as Mohamed Asad translates it, and the root rhm is shared with Hebrew, used often in the Old Testament to denote God’s concern for us, His recognition of our weakness, and His abundance of gifts.

People brought up in a religious community are aware that much has been given to them, both materially and spiritually. They will feel an instinctive leaning towards John Bunyan’s sentiment, in entitling his autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. It was St Paul who described himself as ‘the chief of sinners’: but if this title was earned by St Paul and by Bunyan, what of you and me? Most people who have examined their own lives with the eye of judgement have come to Bunyan’s conclusion—that there is no way in which they can be forgiven for all that they have done without the grace of God, on which their rescue depends. The idea that the world is sustained by gift is second nature to religious people, who believe that they should be givers in their turn, if they are to receive the gift on which they depend for their salvation.

Butz is the brother-in-law of Corazon Aquino, who died of cancer on August 1. At the time of the dinner Ms. Aquino was president of the Philippines. She had displaced its autocratic president, Ferdinand Marcos, in the aftermath of what turned out to be a relatively peaceful revolution. While the revolution had many causes, the trigger had been the 1983 assassination of Butz’s brother and Cory’s husband, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, as he was returning to his country from exile to contest Marcos.

The article noted that the students promised they would, among other things, “serve the greater good,” “act with the utmost integrity,” and guard against “decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.” About half the class took the pledge; the Economist’s writer noted that “such naivety, if that is what it is, will not survive long beyond the university’s walls.”

Milton Friedman is frequently quoted as saying the only obligation a good capitalist has is to “maximize profits.” One can, of course, come up with multiple complex definitions of what that phrase means. Does it mean shorter- or longer-term profits? If the latter, over what span of time? Any discussion about maximizing profits must also include brand value, accounting treatment, the allocation of available cash, potential mergers or acquisitions, and on and on.

Over the years I have managed both small and relatively large enterprises without an MBA—or a pledge. I have tried, clumsily and episodically, to be attentive to my faith in God and to the ultimate importance of his commandments. There have been internal tensions as a result, as well as some external clashes, and I will be the first to admit to the difficulty of aligning faith and action in a postmodern society. But whatever my mental or spiritual processes, I was never naïve about the expectations of business or God.