The ancient philosopher Diogenes is reputed to have walked the streets of Athens with a lamp in broad daylight looking for an honest man. Diogenes obviously felt that the honest individual was a rare specimen in the society of his day.

Religion today, Christianity more specifically, contends with a variety of negatives. In Britain churches are being sold to ambitious entrepreneurs for conversion to upscale bistros. In Europe, society is said to be de-Christianised, though people are simultaneously said to remain “spiritual.” The Pope removed limbo from the list of Catholic doctrines, though, more importantly, and for many more Catholics, God the Judge is more remote than God the King, and hell draws a blank.

A couple of stories have recently been aired of executives who predicted a financial day of reckoning for Wall Street. In one way or another they underlined the inevitability of disaster, given the absence of on target financial oversight. 

In this article, I’m turning on its head the religious concern often expressed by parents in the form, “Will our children have faith,” and I’m also taking “faith” to mean the world of valu

Less than a decade ago, Francis Fukuyama, a distinguished political scientist in the US, declared after the collapse of socialism that capitalist democracy was “the final destination” to which human development had been heading. The market economy, he said, had won a decisive intellectual and political victory, suggesting a “common evolutionary pattern for all human societies.” What we had now was “a society without opposition.” It would have amazed Fukuyama to imagine that what would confront us instead in that short space of time would be a market economy on the brink of collapse.

A common philosophical judgment today is that pluralism destroys the possibility of any single definition of the good life.
One person’s good is another person’s bad. We should therefore set aside all notions of singularity and let different conceptions thrive. There’s nothing new about plurality in this matter, in my opinion. We have always lived with the view that there are in fact many kinds of good life.

Tomorrow the world will welcome Barack Obama, an African-American who went from the insignificance of being “a skinny kid with a funny name” to the eminence of the presidency of the United States. Months ago, when Obama secured the Democratic nomination, James E Clyburn, the black House Majority Whip, confessed that the significance of the event so moved him, he had to go home, lock his doors, and cry in private.