As hundreds of thousands of Arsenal fans hit the streets to demonstrate their love for their club, we saw how the communal sharing of the whole spectrum of emotions — joy, pain, and disappointment amongst them — is one of the ways sport can bind people together

Philip North, Bishop of Blackburn, Thought for the Day, Radio 4, 1 June

I don’t describe myself as an atheist: I describe myself as an agnostic. . . But I will try and live my life according to certain values, which are Christian values; but I’m not going to use the Bible as a textbook for how to be in government, what rules and regulations should come in

Kemi Badenoch, Leader of the Opposition, Piers Morgan Uncensored, 1 June

Looking at the Church’s responses to many of the popular issues of the age, one increasingly encounters the lingo of administrators, facilitators and communications departments. We experience the Church less as a voice crying in the wilderness than as a purveyor of messages from the comms team

James Martin Charlton, playright and director, The Critic, 2 June

The relative powerlessness of governments opens up a power vacuum into which someone like the Pontifex can provide non-state guidance, some moral gravitas with which to at least try to hold multinational private companies to account. But he also urges states and trans-national institutions to put in fair rules

Alys Key, article about papal encyclical and Ton Blair’s essay about AI, The New Statesman, 31 May

What Blair and Pope Leo have in common is that they are trying to intercede while there is still time left to do something about what’s coming

ibid.

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