The Guardian view on the festive season: a suffering world needs messages of peace, hope and goodwill |
In one of his last sermons, the great Christian theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich asked: “Do we have a right to hope?” As an army chaplain to German forces during the first world war and a refugee from Nazi Germany, Tillich had witnessed first-hand some of the horrors of the 20th century. But his answer to the question he posed in 1965 was yes. Nobody could live without hope, Tillich told his Harvard audience, even if it led “through the narrows of a painful and courageous ‘in-spite-of’”.
Sixty years on, a similar spirit of defiant optimism is needed to navigate our own era of conflict and anxiety. The fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is approaching, and dark political forces menace the social fabric of western liberal democracies. More widely, a fracturing multilateral order is delivering a more unstable and threatening world.
According to a report published in June by the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the number of state‑based conflicts in 2024 was higher than at any time since 1946. In Gaza, the declaration of a ceasefire in October has brought partial relief. But amid the ruins, a suffering population remains scandalously short of food and cruelly exposed to........