This is the editorial from our 2026 Summer Newsletter. For the full edition, click here
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Building the Peace
Understanding the times in order to respond faithfully is an ancient discipline. Nehemiah’s night visit to see for himself the ruin of Jerusalem’s walls gave him the moral conviction that made his rebuilding proposal both credible and constructive. Jeremiah’s instruction to the exiles in Babylon was similar in spirit — neither to rebel nor to withdraw into purity, but to “seek the peace of the city… for in its peace you will find your peace.” It was a directive to settle, and to build.
Augustine, reflecting on this centuries later, described the Church as a pilgrim city that avails itself of earthly peace without adopting earthly loves as its own – distinctive in its ultimate loyalty, constructive in its earthly engagement. That double posture, neither withdrawal nor assimilation, remains the pattern for how Christians are called to meet this moment.
What, then, are the times we live in? Several things are happening at once in this interregnum as the old era breaks down and the new unfolds. Fallout from decades of progressive globalisation – commodification, loneliness, inequality, dislocation from place, loss of agency, moral confusion – is provoking on the one hand a yearning for the restoration of a settled life, and on the other a belief that pushing on with, even accelerating, the inner logic of the dying order will only make things better. This tension between sovereignty and globalisation cuts across the old left-right divide.
Into this mix comes the AI revolution. The challenges it presents map onto those opposing positions: if harnessed for the common good, this new technology could play a critical role in restoring agency and settled life; but if left unconstrained, its unprecedented and unaccountable global power threatens what it means to be human.
How this resolves rests on moral questions about the nature of reality. The dying era was driven by a false notion of the human being as an isolated individual, rather than the Christian anthropology of the person as a relational being made in the image of God. Understanding these roots is fundamental to responding authentically: this is what underpins Jeremiah’s call to build a settled life, strengthen human dignity, and resist the powers that undermine flourishing.
Governments are under intense pressure to make good decisions. It remains to be seen whether the new UK leadership will reach clarity on these moral questions, but even if it does, the structural conditions that defeated previous administrations remain, and the years ahead look challenging.
But government cannot and should not be expected to do everything. Catholic Social Teaching asserts that for a healthy society, responsibility must be shared, and it places special importance on the intermediary institutions – church, school, business, charity and family – bodies that are human-scale, positioned between the individual and the state.
In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV calls precisely for this intermediary layer to be strengthened as a means of resisting unaccountable power, in particular the oligarchic power behind AI. He reaches for two images from Scripture: the Tower of Babel, where the effort to build a route to power through uniformity and self-sufficiency without God ends in confusion and scattering; and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, where ordinary people are each responsible for their own short stretch of wall, listening to one another, building together under God.
Clearly, the Church has a distinctive role in terms of moral leadership at times like this. And sometimes, taking a countercultural position is required: we are called to be the handmaid of the Lord, not the handmaid of the state, and this may mean standing in solidarity with those who hold unpopular views.
The Church is called to speak the truth. But as Lord Glasman has noted, the Church has been silent in some critical areas of concern, in particular regarding acts of religious terrorism in our streets. The renunciation of civic violence is, as he puts it, part of what is meant by “the Kingdom.” Catholic Social Teachingregards civic peace as an essential component of the common good: peace is not merely the absence of conflict, it is about building a justice-based social order. The times call for courage.
The choice Pope Leo sets out is Babel or Nehemiah: a false unity built on global ambition without God ending in scattering, or a shared work of many small, faithful contributions to build a settled life. This is as true of how we harness the potential of AI as it is of the need for restoration after globalisation: whether we restore agency or enable unaccountable power will be decided by whether enough of us choose Nehemiah’s distributed, relational approach under God.
None of this need be overwhelming. We are asked only to rebuild our own short stretch of the wall. That same courage is needed in how we build: embedding an authentically relational anthropology in all we do is what turns each small act into part of something larger. This is the work for which Together for the Common Good exists: helping leaders, churches, schools and charities to identify their own stretch of wall, and to fulfil their vocational responsibility in their unique and complementary works of repair.
Wishing you every blessing and a peaceful summer.
Jenny Sinclair
Together for the Common Good
In this edition
Maurice Glasman Christ is King! Restoring a Covenantal Politics
Jenny Sinclair From Service to Communion: Exploring Humanitas for Our Time
John Clifton “What About Me?” Lost Sheep and the Limits of Charity
T4CG Discover Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV
Leaving Egypt podcast: new episodes Bishop Guli Francis Dehqani, Justin Gill, Tim Soerens, Maurice Glasman, Ian Williamson
T4CG Report on AI, the Future of Work and Christian Discernment
Jo Stow Common Good Schools: Summer Update
Date for your diary: 13 October – our next Staying Human online lecture with John Clifton – booking is now open
To read the full edition of this newsletter, click here
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