Thought for the Day

Sometimes, digging into the origins of a word can help with real insights into a contemporary issue.

Take the meaning of the word person. The ancient Greeks used the word for face – prosopon – to mean a person, while in Latin, the word persona, from which we get the English person, owes its origins to sonare, which means to sound. So ideas about a person in these ancient languages focused on what can be seen and heard – the face and the voice. They’re integral to how people connect with one another.

This importance of the person came to mind when I read reports this week that the revamped NHS app, sold to the public as providing patients with a doctor in their pocket by digitising services, has had a distressing unforeseen drawback. Some patients, according to these reports, discovered test results for serious illnesses, such as cancer, by them being uploaded on the app. The NHS has said it has reissued guidance to stop this happening, confirming the importance of the soothing voice of a doctor breaking bad news. As one patient who says this happened to them, put it: “Seeing someone face to face is so important”.

Technology can speed life up and be super-efficient, but there are clearly alienating, impersonal drawbacks too. When Pope Leo was elected a year ago, he said he was going to make artificial intelligence a key priority of his work. He’s about to release his first encyclical, or teaching document on AI, focusing on the importance of human dignity as the world undergoes such profound technological change. He’s also released a message on AI for the Catholic Church’s annual World Communications Day, being marked this Sunday. It warns AI can erode people’s ability to think analytically and creatively.

Not that Pope Leo is a Luddite opposed to change. He’s comfortable with technology. One of his brothers told a reporter that when he got locked out of his computer recently, he phoned the Pope who quickly told him what to do to get back in.

But Leo’s concern is that if AI takes over areas of life where human interaction used to be essential, it damages the deepest levels of human communication.

People of faith, like Pope Leo, believe that faces and voices are sacred because God created humanity in his image and likeness. Back in the fourth century, St Gregory of Nyssa said that preserving human faces and voices means preserving an indelible reflection of divine love. It’s as true today as it was then. For a patient facing bad news, a gentle voice and a consoling look can mean the difference between what you can bear and what you cannot.

14 MAY 26

Good morning,
In Monday’s speech, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer used the word ‘hope’ 14 times. He said the country would see hope reflected in government policy, and that “people need hope.”
Today, faith groups and civil society organisations have launched a week-long initiative called A Million Acts of Hope – a nationwide invitation to celebrate the everyday acts of kindness, care and connection happening across the UK to combat the growing sense of division and polarisation so many feel.
Many of us in Britain today can’t help but sense a growing hope-lessness.
Perhaps it’s long been there and it’s the ever-present drum of social media and a 24-hour news cycle that have made it feel like it’s taken root.
Politicians of all parties have long employed the language of hope in their speeches. It’s an appeal to the very human instinct to believe there’s a future state or condition that will be better in some way.
But as a Christian, I believe hope is something much deeper than optimism, more than a sometimes blinkered decision to always look on the bright side. When in the book of Jeremiah God speaks of giving “a hope and a future”, it’s a profound promise of what’s to come, regardless of current circumstances.
Hope itself is also active and not static. As Emily Dickinson described in her 1861 poem, it’s like a bird, a thing with feathers, that “perches in the soul” and “never stops at all”.
As a nation – and as a world – we’ve been through so much in recent years: the worsening climate crisis, a pandemic, economic instability and turbulent politics. It feels like the nation can’t catch a break, and that we are breaking apart.
But by engaging in these million acts of hope, those participating are offering an alternative narrative.
As American episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge said this week, stories of acts of kindness across political divides help foster hope. For her, such illustrations “arouse feelings of neighbourliness where there might otherwise be only estrangement”. The sense of us all being in this together needs to be supported “not with morality lectures but with examples”. Don’t tell me! Show me!”
There’s an active selflessness to these hopeful acts of kindness – the millions we see and experience every day. A reminder that we as a nation are capable of acting beyond our own self-interest to look at the needs of those around us, to participate in hope-making.
In these turbulent times, I find hope when I encounter others who show profound kindness. I feel most hopeful when those acts come from a group I’ve been told are ‘other’ to me in some way.
None of us should put our hope in politics alone, but perhaps each of us might see the face of God in the million small kindnesses of others that together point to a hope that’s much bigger, and much more profound.

Good morning.
A German holiday maker has successfully sued his tour operator alleging that he had spent 20 minutes every morning trying, without success, to find sun loungers by the pool. He was on the case at 6 a.m. but the loungers were already covered in towels, though they often remained unoccupied through the day whilst he and his family lay on the ground. The Court awarded him damages. Another tourist commenting on this story gleefully recalls an alternative solution to the problem: 'it soon stopped when some lads were going down in the middle of the night and throwing all the towels into the pool.' But our more law abiding litigant hopes that the fear of legal action will spur tour operators and hotels to devise fair and rational allocation systems for these highly contested spaces.

As far as I know, Thomas Hobbes never took a package holiday, but having lived through the turmoil of the English civil war and its aftermath, he would not have been surprised by stories of so called 'sunbed wars': 'during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe' so he tells us in his great work Leviathan, 'they are in that condition called war'. Hobbes' father was a vicar, and his relationship to Christianity is complicated, as is perhaps not uncommon in such circumstances. But Hobbes' views are not so different from Augustine's, who was in the habit of noting that just as divine history begins with the story of Cain killing Abel, so world history begins with the story of Romulus killing Remus. For Augustine, it is 'every man against every man' as Hobbes puts it, and not just poolside.

I know nothing about the personal beliefs of our German litigant, but I think he is a bit of a hero for spurning two obvious but unhelpful responses to this gloomy diagnosis of the human condition. One is to take the law into your own hands - throwing the towels in the pool - which could end rather badly of course. The other is just to grumble - and who doesn't enjoy a good grumble?

Of all the things in the world which are unfairly and irrationally distributed, sun loungers are by no means the most significant. Houses lie empty, while children sleep on the streets. Food goes to waste while there is hunger. Medicines expire on shelves, and diseases go untreated. Christians have never needed to be told that humans can be deeply selfish, but everywhere the faith is truly alive there have been dreamers and prophets, from St Francis to Martin Luther King, who have contended that the world doesn't have to be determined by our flawed natures, even if we need to reckon with their existence and character. Who knows whether the sunbed wars will come to an end, but Mr Eggert - let's give him his name and due credit – by pushing the tour operators and hotels into action has given us hope for bloodless revolutions.

Good morning.
Ocean transport has rarely left our news headlines over these last few weeks. The ongoing efforts of the USA and Iran to block or open up the Strait of Hormuz now being joined by the plight of passengers on a virus struck cruise ship, finally docked in Tenerife.
It’s tempting then, to think of the world’s oceans primarily as means of transporting travellers and goods. Yet, as ocean naturalists, from Rachel Carson to David Attenborough, have repeatedly reminded us, the seas are home to a vast array of amazing species.
The wonders of our oceans are however, now at significant risk from two direct consequences of human activity, climate change and pollution. Indeed, it’s widely argued by scientists that, for the seas to recover, a minimum of 30% of the world’s oceans will need to be protected by 2030.
The challenge, as so often with regard to environmental damage, is our human reluctance to take short term sacrifices for longer term gain. Or else we so frame the actions required by way of sacrifice that they fall disproportionately on the poorest among our communities and nations. It is here that two core aspects of my own faith come together.
First, as Psalm 95 in the Hebrew Scriptures asserts, “The sea is his, and he made it”. That tells me, our human accountability to God extends to our treatment of the oceans just as much as it does the dry land.
Second, those of us with greater wealth or assets are expected to shoulder the heavier burden. As Jesus says in Luke 12: 48, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”
Governments have a vital part to play. The High Seas Treaty, which came into force earlier this year, and the UK Parliament has now legislated to ratify, affords opportunity for safeguarding large swathes of the oceans. The Sargasso Sea, surrounding the Island of Bermuda, and home to a rich and diverse range of species, is a prime candidate for environmental protection measures that avoid destroying the livelihoods of local fishing communities
I’m grateful too for the work of campaigning organisations, such as Greenpeace, whose ship Witness, I was privileged to visit, with other parliamentarians, recently. Along with sister vessels, it monitors biodiversity and plastic pollution in sensitive areas, exposing behaviours that jeopardise the seas and challenging us all to do better.
Together, treaties and campaigners offer me hope that we can yet treasure the world’s oceans for their true value, a value far far beyond their immediate usefulness as means to transport the world’s supplies of oil. But, as Jesus stated so bluntly, our own individual practices matter too.