Belonging Should Not Depend on Knowing Your Place
To be judged by the family you were born into is to face a verdict before you have had much opportunity to live. What you might become is made secondary to where other people…
Read article →Articles & Writing
Essays, observations and ideas to explore.
Nobody Should Have to Answer for an Entire Faith
There is a peculiar burden in being expected to explain people you have never met. Someone commits an offence, makes a threat or says something appalling, and suddenly your name or religion is treated…
Read article →Resilience Should Never Become an Excuse for Displacement
Being able to leave home and expect to come back is an ordinary freedom, so ordinary that many of us scarcely notice it. We make arrangements for next week. Leave something unfinished. Assume that…
Read article →Resilience Must Not Become an Excuse for Displacement
A family’s ability to begin again should never become part of the argument for making them leave. Yet there is a danger in how readily we praise human resilience. We admire people who rebuild…
Read article →Familiar Places Can Still Ask Us to Change Our Plans
A road can be part of someone’s daily life for years and still become a road they should not take tomorrow. There is something difficult about accepting that. Familiarity gives us a useful confidence,…
Read article →Grief Does Not Settle What Should Happen Next
After people are killed in a place of worship, the demand that something be done has an obvious human force. Those who have lost someone have to live with an absence that no public…
Read article →Ordinary Safety Cannot Depend on Whose Side You Take
A person should be able to leave home without having to calculate whether they will return. Much of what we call ordinary life rests on that expectation. Work, family, even the small irritation of…
Read article →Independence Depends on Things We Rarely Have to Notice
When the power goes off, ordinary tasks begin to require decisions. How much charge is left in the phone? Can a meal be made? Who needs to know that getting through the evening may…
Read article →A Home Is Also Permission to Plan Tomorrow
Much of ordinary life depends on being able to assume that tomorrow will be recognisable. You leave something unfinished because you expect to return to it. You make arrangements for next week. Children learn…
Read article →The Freedom to Have an Ordinary Tomorrow
Making plans is such an ordinary activity that we can forget what it assumes. You arrange to see someone next week because you expect there to be a next week in which the arrangement…
Read article →Nobody Should Have to Answer for Everyone Like Them
Imagine arriving at a family gathering and discovering that, before you can be yourself, you are expected to account for people you have never met, decisions you did not make and a government you…
Read article →The Limits of Our Attention Need Not Define Our Responsibilities
Most of us organise our days around people we can name. Someone needs collecting, a parent needs a call, there is work unfinished and something in the house has stopped working. These obligations are…
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