Genuine hope is quite different from optimism or wishful thinking, says Simon Barrow. To understand it we need fresh eyes attuned to the artfulness of reality and the presence of love even in the midst of suffering.

Religion that binds others with condemnation and superstition is far from the heart of the Gospel, says Simon Barrow. The church needs to face its arguments and seek to be a place of healing if it is to rediscover its global role.

Globalisation constructed as top-down control and the triumph of the powerful needs to be disrupted by a different and gentler logic, says Simon Barrow. But will we choose Pentecost or Babel?

The notion and shape of 'the land' means many things to many people, as the contradictory responses to this 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel are showing. Simon Barrow looks at the relationship between rootedness and aspiration.

The modern temptation is to dismiss resurrection as fantasy or reduce it to spiritualised sophistry, says Simon Barrow. The shape of the core Christian hope is both more substantial and more subtle than that.

In a reflection on faith and human rights for Easter, Savi Hensman argues that issues of life and death and the question about whether Christians are on the side of the powerful or the powerless go to the heart of the Gospel story.

Actual sea changes in politics come rarely, but they do come, so don't let cynicism make you a functional reactionary, says Johan Maurer, who particularly wishes that the evangelical Christian community would be released from hero-worship and grasped by a biblical vision of social justice.

Christians are fleeing Iraq and Christianity risks disappearing from the country, says a senior Baghdad archbishop, reiterating appeals made recently to Western churches to intercede with their governments about the Iraqis' plight.

Christian faith is about sustaining faith in face of the knowledge and reality of death, says Simon Barrow. The feasts of All Saints and All Souls put us in solidarity with a host of people who have struggled to see right prevail.