Rev Dr Sam Wells

Good morning. When we talk about justice, we picture punishment, verdicts delivered, sentences pronounced, the drama of a courtroom. We talk less about what justice is for, what kind of life it is meant to make possible. I’ve been thinking about that because I’ve just finished jury service. For days I sat with eleven strangers, reminded how fragile justice is, how much it depends on ordinary people listening carefully, trying to hold someone else’s story without breaking it. The law, up close, feels less like marble and more like human breath. That experience drew me back to Rose Heilbron, a woman from Liverpool and one of the great figures of British legal history. My own family comes from that same stretch of Liverpool, and I imagine what it meant for girls like my mother to see someone who sounded a little like them taking her seat in the Old Bailey. Her career was marked by remarkable firsts: among the first women appointed King’s Counsel, the first to lead a murder prosecution, the first woman judge at the Old Bailey. By simply being there, she changed who Britain believed could speak with authority. Her most lasting contribution came in the 1970s when she chaired a committee on the treatment of women reporting rape and sexual assault. It argued that complainants’ identities should be protected and their sexual history not used to discredit them. Behind those reforms lay a conviction: justice cannot function if it humiliates the wounded. A system that deters the vulnerable from coming forward manufactures silence. That conviction feels close this week. Recently released court documents in the United States again exposed how wealth and influence enabled the abuse of women and girls, perpetrators and collaborators protected with a vigour the victims’ could only dream of. Jewish tradition teaches that law exists to guard human dignity – kevod habriyot. The Bible warns: do not oppress the stranger, “for you know the soul of the stranger.” The rabbis understood the stranger as anyone made small by power, anyone whose story can be turned against them. Rose Heilbron’s work lived inside that teaching. She understood that a courtroom should be a place where shame changes sides, where those exposed are finally covered, and those who abused power stand in the light. Perhaps that is what justice is for: not the last word of a story, but the first breath after a long holding of breath –a fragile peace in which the vulnerable are believed, and the rest of us are changed by having listened. Because a society is judged not only by how it punishes the guilty, but by how carefully it guards those who risk everything to speak.

05 FEB 2026

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31 JAN 26

Thursday night saw a glitzy premiere at Windsor Castle, complete with film stars on the red carpet. But rather than a Hollywood blockbuster or homegrown movie, this was the launch of a documentary by the King. Called Finding Harmony, it will be released next week. It is being promoted as the King’s vision for the planet, while the head of the king’s charity, the King’s Foundation, says it is about his philosophy of harmony. While the documentary explores the King’s well-known love of nature and his thoughts on the future of the planet, his interest in the philosophy of harmony is perhaps not so well-known. Yet it is something that he has been mulling over for decades. A whole section of a two-volume set of his speeches is devoted to harmony, what he calls “a grammar” that underscores, art, architecture and spirituality of all the great religions. He spoke about this harmony in a speech at the UN climate change conference COP28 in late 2023. There’s a moment in the documentary which shows the then Prince Charles joking that people thought his ideas were “dotty”, “It was sandals and long hair”, he said. But the idea of harmony owes its origins to ancient Greek and Christian thinking. In a speech he gave in 2015 in Louisville, Kentucky, Prince Charles urged people to develop joined-up thinking about interdependent relationships within nature. “The ancient Greek word for the process of joining things up was Harmonia”, he said, “so joined-up thinking needs to create harmony”. This idea of harmony is evident in Plato’s work, The Timaeus, where he describes the cosmos as a collection of elements arranged in musical ratios and this internal harmony ensures its survival, while St Ambrose, one of the earliest Christian writers saw the creation of the world, described in the Book of Genesis, as a narrative about harmony with a balance between the elements. He saw the way voices are lifted in harmony as symbolising the greater harmony of God’s creation. Someone else who, like the King, expressed concern at a lack of harmony in the way people live now, was Pope Francis. In his major work on the environment, Laudato Si, he warned that humanity’s arrogance in attempting to dominate planet Earth had upset the balance of creation. “The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations”, he wrote. In other words, if there is any chance of the joined-up thinking the King calls for in our relationship with one another and with nature, a starting point for harmony needs to be humility.

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