Together for the Common Good Public Talks

In this time of deep change, it is vital to find ways of staying human—and to do so within a constructive story of spiritual and civic renewal. Across the UK, we are seeing an unravelling—fragmentation, a collapse of trust in the state and growing discontent, especially in places most affected by the dehumanising systems of deindustrialisation and globalisation. Serious questions arise: How can we restore a common life? What does Christian solidarity mean in places experiencing abandonment? How can we stay human? Where is Christ to be found? In this talk, Captain Dr John Clifton confronts the human and spiritual consequences of this political and economic project in particular on post-industrial working-class communities. Drawing on his experience of ministry in some of Britain’s most marginalised places, and on the Franciscan, Salvationist and Catholic Social Teaching traditions, he challenges Christians to look beyond the political labels and cultural divisions that obscure the deeper realities of people’s lives. At a time when expressions of national identity and popular anger are too readily dismissed or exploited, Clifton calls for a more discerning Christian response, attentive to the longing for dignity, meaning and belonging. He sees the local church less as a provider of charitable services, more as a neighbour enabling the rebuilding of relationships and bonds of common life. This challenging and hopeful lecture reveals the importance of proximity, solidarity and Christian witness, and invites us to recognise Christ already at work in places that have been written out of the future.Captain Dr John Clifton is Divisional Leader for The Salvation Army in the North East of England, following fourteen years of local ministry in complex urban communities. Based in North Shields, he has led congregations through experiences of trauma, social breakdown and renewal, while engaging with public institutions and political decision-makers through community organising. He holds a PhD in Systematic Theology, lectures at the International College for Officers and writes at the Substack “Christ in the Margins.” His work brings together theology, community life and public engagement, exploring what it means to encounter Jesus Christ among those experiencing marginalisation and powerlessness.This is the sixth in our Staying Human series. The event was convened and moderated by Jenny Sinclair, Founder Director of Together for the Common Good, and took place on 13 October 2026 in London before an invited audience, with others joining online.Apology: thanks to a technical error the audio isn’t so good between 36.52-38:47. We hope this doesn’t affect your listening experience too much. You can read the full text of the lecture here.Learn more about Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com.Hear more from John Clifton on the Leaving Egypt podcast: in Episode 55, With Christ in the Margins, John joins Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair to explore emerging expressions of Christian identity in working-class communities affected by marginalisation and powerlessness. He calls the church to consider what it means to encounter Christ here, and what it takes to foster solidarity and contribute to economic and spiritual renewal. Listen to the conversation here. Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe

In this time of profound change, it is vital to find ways of staying human - and to do so within a constructive story of spiritual and civic renewal. A society destabilised by the failure of the hyper-liberal philosophy of the past forty years now also faces the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and the likely displacement of jobs at scale. Serious questions lie before us: How can we restore our common life? How can we stay human?In this episode, Matthew Sanders confronts the realities of the new industrial revolution now unfolding through AI: its rapid timeline, its profound effects on work, livelihoods, and meaning. Drawing on his practical experience of the industry and on a deep understanding of the Catholic Social Teaching tradition, he shows what must be done to uphold human agency and mitigate the risk of social unrest. Sanders sees the local church not as a fading institution but as the essential bulwark to preserve conscience, vocation and belonging. This sobering lecture reveals the vital need for formation in authentic anthropology, and the deeper purpose of Christian witness in our time.Matthew Harvey Sanders is Founder and CEO of Longbeard, the leading mission-driven technology company building faithful, Catholic-oriented artificial intelligence. The Longbeard team has developed some of the most significant Catholic AI initiatives in the world, including Magisterium.com a powerful large language model trained exclusively on official Church documents and ancient Christian manuscripts; Vulgate AI, a dedicated tool for biblical access and study; and Ephrem, the world’s first fully dedicated Catholic AI. Sanders is committed to creating technology that fosters human solidarity, serves the Church, and challenges the dominant technocratic paradigms of our age. He is also the founder of the Builders AI Forum and has served as a digital strategist for numerous Catholic nonprofits, creating ethical tech platforms for evangelisation and environmental education.Read the text of the lecture: AI, the Future of Work and Christian DiscernmentThis is the fifth in our Staying Human series. This event was convened and moderated by Jenny Sinclair, Founder Director of Together for the Common Good, and took place on 20 May 2026 in London before an invited audience. This was followed by a round table with 30 leaders, and a small parliamentary discussion: download a report about Sanders’ visit hereLearn more about Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.comListen to our sister podcast, Leaving Egypt, where we read the signs of the times and explore what it means to be God’s people in these times of unravelling: leavingegypt.com Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe

In this time of deep change, it is vital to find ways of staying human—and to do so within a constructive story of spiritual and civic renewal. Everything seems to be unravelling, including what it means to care for each other and even how we understand life and death. Serious questions lie before us: How can we restore our common life? How can we stay human?In this episode, Useful Lives, Dan Hitchens asks what the advance of assisted suicide really means. Dan addresses the profound cultural shift signaled by current legislation, marking a transition from the era of Cicely Saunders and the hospice movement to a new age where death is presented as a solution to what some advocates refer to as ‘useless lives.’ Setting the contemporary debate in its historical context, Dan prompts us to consider how we should respond to this hinge moment for British society.Dan Hitchens is the Senior Editor at First Things magazine and a contributor to Compact, Unherd, The New Statesman, The Spectator, The Critic, Christianity Magazine, and various other publications. Formerly, he edited the Catholic Herald. As a freelance journalist, Dan has been conducting a forensic examination into the issue of assisted suicide which can be found on X at @ddhitchens. He holds a PhD on the 18th-century author Samuel Johnson, who is the guiding spirit for his personal newsletter. Dan is also the co-author of The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2025). He writes on Substack here.Read Dan’s text here.This is the fourth in our Staying Human series. This event was convened and moderated by Jenny Sinclair, Founder Director of Together for the Common Good, and took place on 21 November 2025 in London before an invited audience.Learn more about Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com.Listen to our sister podcast, Leaving Egypt, where we read the signs of the times and explore what it means to be God’s people in these times of unravelling: leavingegypt.com. Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe

In this time of deep change, it is vital to find ways of staying human—and to do so within a constructive story of spiritual and civic renewal. As we recognize the failure of the hyper-liberal philosophy of the past forty years, people are feeling the loss of agency and we are seeing increasingly widespread discontent. With concentrations of money and state power intensifying, the breakdown of trust - and the rapid advance of AI - our political, cultural, and spiritual life is increasingly marked by confusion.Serious questions lie before us: How can we restore our common life? How can we stay human?In this episode, Being a Person in the Age of AI, Susannah Black Roberts addresses what it means to be human in terms of personhood - and what can be done at the personal and community level. She explores how we as Christians are called to live at this moment in our history - what kinds of practices we should adopt to live the way of Jesus in a world that threatens to make us obsolete.Susannah opens up the territory for a vital conversation about upholding the sacred and resisting the dehumanising potential of AI to prompt us to consider what this means for discipleship and Christian witness in the places where we live and work.Susannah is Senior Editor at Plough Quarterly and an editor at Mere Orthodoxy. Currently she is working on a book on living out the political virtues in our private lives, and several projects related to the development of a Christian humanism for today’s world. Susannah writes for many publications, including First Things, Front Porch Republic, and The American Conservative. A native Manhattanite, she is married to an Englishman and lives between New York and the West Midlands in the UK. She writes on the Substack Anchored in Argosy and can be found on X at @suzania.Download the text of Susannah’s lecture: Being a Person in the Age of AIThis is the third in our Staying Human series. This event was convened and moderated by Jenny Sinclair, Founder Director of Together for the Common Good, and took place on 21 October 2025 in London before an invited audience.Learn more about Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com.Listen to our sister podcast, Leaving Egypt, where we read the signs of the times and explore what it means to be God’s people in these times of unravelling: leavingegypt.com. Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe

In this time of deep change, it is vital to find ways of staying human—and to do so within a constructive story of spiritual and civic renewal. As we recognise the failure of the hyper-liberal philosophy of the past forty years, people are feeling the loss of agency and there a rising sense of discontent. With concentrations of money and state power intensifying, the rapid advance of AI, and the breakdown of trust, our political, cultural, and spiritual life is increasingly marked by confusion.Serious questions lie before us: How can we restore our common life? How can we stay human?In this episode, Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman explore Statecraft for the Common Good. Together, they examine how political economy and the state must be organised to address our current crises—and how to do so in light of the challenges and opportunities presented by AI. Rooted in the tradition of Catholic Social Thought, and with deep experience in the mechanics of government, grassroots and parliamentary politics, and as people of faith, they open up the territory for a vital conversation.Download the texts of both lectures here:* From Tragedy to Restoration - Shaping the New Era - Maurice Glasman* From Crisis to Meaning – Renewal and the Spirit of Justice - Jon CruddasJon Cruddas is currently Co-Chair of the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion, and Co-Leader of the Future of the Left Project at Policy Exchange. Formerly MP for Dagenham for 23 years, Jon is now at the leading edge of the debate around modern industrial relations, work, and employment in the age of artificial intelligence. He is a Senior Fellow at the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at the University of Oxford and the author of The Dignity of Labour.Maurice Glasman is the Director of the Common Good Foundation and the founder of the Blue Labour movement. Lord Glasman is a life peer and a key figure in the current battle for Labour’s soul, urging the party to reconnect with its founding principles. Alongside his academic and political work, he has for many years been involved in authentic community organising, most recently in Grimsby. He is the author of Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good.Just a heads-up: The sound quality in the Q&A part of the recording is a bit patchy. We’re very sorry about this, but we hope you’ll still enjoy this fascinating and informative conversation.This is the second in our Staying Human series. The event was convened and moderated by Jenny Sinclair, Founder Director of Together for the Common Good, and took place on 15 September 2025 in London before an invited audience.Learn more about Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.comListen to our sister podcast, Leaving Egypt, where we read the signs of the times and explore what it means to be God’s people in these times of unravelling: leavingegypt.comKnow someone who would like this? Feel free to share this post.This Substack is reader-supported. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe

In this time of deep change, it is vital to find ways of staying human, and to do so within a constructive story of spiritual and civic renewal. Politics is downstream of culture and so there is only so much governments can do - we are all called to play our part in building the common good. In this episode, Luke Bretherton helps the churches to recover the memory of the commons, the God-shaped space where we discover what it means to be human together with others. Framing the challenges ahead within a Christian understanding of political economy, Luke sets out why forms of local association are vital, both as means of staying human, and as a way of resisting the domination of market and state.Luke Bretherton is the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, where he also directs the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life. This appointment, which was approved by King Charles, also includes ordination – so Luke is a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral and has duties as a Church of England priest. Until recently Luke was the Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology at Duke University in the United States, and Visiting Professor at St Mellitus Theological College, London. He’s written many books, most recently A Primer in Christian Ethics and Christ and the Common Life. Alongside this, Luke draws on his long experience of community organising and from what he has learned from many collaborations with churches, charities and mission agencies.To download the slides that accompany this talk, click hereTo download the text of this talk, click hereThis lecture was held on 19 February 2025 and is the first of our Staying Human Series. Introduced by Jenny Sinclair, founder director of Together for the Common Good, this event was held in partnership with CCLA.Join our community on Substack: t4cg.substack.comListen to our sister podcast, Leaving Egypt, where we read the signs of the times and look to local stories of hope in these times of unravelling. Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe

In this time of seismic change and instability, many of us are finding the scale of injustice overwhelming. It can be inspiring to look to the Christian martyrs for justice whose lives were “written in blood” – extraordinary people whose stories of truth, justice and peace, in the face of indifference and opposition, offered witness to a hope-filled future of solidarity and fraternity. But what are the causes of injustice in our time, and what does it mean to live a life written in blood today? This was the theme set for Jenny Sinclair for the 2023 Justice and Peace Europe General Assembly annual lecture. The lecture was given on 12 November 2023 in the oratory of St John’s co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta, before the masterpiece the Beheading of St John the Baptist by Caravaggio.Learn more at www.togetherforthecommongood.co.ukListen to our sister podcast, Leaving Egypt where we read the signs of the times and look to local stories of hope in these times of unravelling.Connect with Together for the Common Good: Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CGFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUKInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/Connect with Jenny Sinclair:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/ Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe

Christian social action has grown significantly in the UK over the last two decades. But too often well-intentioned charitable initiatives are disconnected from justice, can deepen dependency and can drift in a secular direction. In a time of profound social and political change and increasing inequality, Jon Kuhrt opens up an honest conversation about impact, power and authentic Christian witness.Watch video here | Download Jon’s text here and a report of the event hereDrawing on the wisdom of the Christian traditions, including Catholic social thought and the theology of Lesslie Newbigin, Jon also reflects on the legacy of Frank Field, in whose honour this talk was given. MP for Birkenhead for forty years, Frank was a committed Christian who put his faith into practice, and was unequalled in his dedication to improving the lives of people trapped in poverty.Jon Kuhrt is Chief Executive of Hope into Action and host of the Grace and Truth Blog. Formerly Jon was the Rough Sleeping Adviser to the UK Government Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and before that, CEO of West London Mission, and Director of Community Mission for Livability. He lives with his family in South London, and loves cricket.This lecture was held on 15 July 2024, part of our 2024 series exploring the Christian vocation in these uncertain times. You may also be interested in Challenging Power, Changing Practice and Deepening Spirituality: The Future of UK Christian Social Action by Jenny Sinclair and Jon KuhrtJoin our community on Substack: t4cg.substack.comListen to our sister podcast, Leaving Egypt, where we read the signs of the times and look to local stories of hope in these times of unravelling.Help us continue this work. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe

Matt Petrusek demystifies the new secular ideologies, exploring their origins and features, offering a common good response rooted in the Catholic Social Thought tradition. He shows how this serves as an antidote to identity politics, providing us with not only a worldview shaped around the transcendent nature of the person, but also, in this moment of cultural confusion, an opportunity for evangelisation.Professor Matthew Petrusek is the Senior Director and Professor of Catholic Ethics at the Word on Fire Institute in the US. He writes and lectures on philosophical and theological ethics, Christian theology, politics, social issues and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. His latest book is Evangelisation and Ideology: How to understand and respond to the political culture.This lecture was held on 1 February 2024 and is part of our 2024 series exploring how Catholic Social Thought helps us stay human and build the common good in these uncertain times. Introduced by Jenny Sinclair, this was held in partnership with Word on Fire UK and CCLA.Join our community on Substack: t4cg.substack.comListen to our sister podcast, Leaving Egypt, where we read the signs of the times and look to local stories of hope in these times of unravelling. Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe

Drawing on Catholic Social Teaching, Sr Helen Alford examines the causes of division from the perspectives of economy, anthropology, truth, freedom and natural law, and explores how the people of the church are called to respond.Sr Helen Alford is president of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences and Dean of the Faculty for Social Sciences at the Angelicum, Rome’s Pontifical University. An economist, she teaches economic ethics, the history of technology, labour politics, and Catholic social thought. Sr Helen is from England, lives in Rome and is a sister of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine of Siena of Newcastle, Natal.This lecture was given on 27 November 2023 as part a series of nine lectures featuring speakers from different traditions who draw on Catholic Social Thought to explore how the Christian tradition can be a blessing on public life and discourse. Introduced and curated by Jenny Sinclair, these talks were held in partnership with Lincoln Cathedral and CCLA.You can read the full lecture here: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Sr-Helen-Alford-Just-Peace-27Nov2023-FINAL.pdfJoin our community on Substack: t4cg.substack.comListen to our sister podcast, Leaving Egypt, where we read the signs of the times and look to local stories of hope in these times of unravelling. Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe