Reading these essays, the threads that interconnect the different elements of care in our society are clear. When you lack care for one aspect of existence it is easy to imagine this seeping into all other areas.

Several of the women I speak to tell me they were in Direct Provision for more than five years. They have had children in that time, children who still do not know anything other than sharing just one room with their family in an overcrowded centre full of people. When you have lived in an institution for a long period of time, the constraints can start to feel like safety. One woman tells me that she has had her papers for a couple of months and is preparing for the move out of the centre, but her relief at leaving is tinged with trepidation. At least in the centre, she says, there are always others to turn to, but “nobody looks out for you outside.”

Global threats to human security and safety require a global response. On 17 December 2018, the UN General Assembly affirmed the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR).[16] The main objectives of the GCR are to: ease pressures on countries that welcome and host refugees; build self-reliance of refugees; expand access to resettlement in third countries; and support conditions in countries of origin for safe return. Undoubtedly, the GCR has admirable goals and a vision to effect positive change for refugees and forcibly displaced persons worldwide. However, the challenge is to ensure the high-level commitments translate into actions that address the needs on the ground and impact positively on the lives of forced migrants and their families.

That is the way we should be thinking about the planetary crisis, in terms of new opportunities for rethinking the good life, rethinking human relationships with each other, rethinking human relationships with the earth, and so on at this time. Contrast this to the dominant public discussion of this issue in terms of framing it (and therefore delimiting it) to a continuation of business as usual. The effect of this is to maintain capitalism, consumerism, and our lifestyles as they are now, but perhaps drawing on renewable energy to do so.

As the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has recorded, between 1990 and 2010 there was a fairly consistent level of global forced displacement of between 30-50 million people per annum. However, the past 10 years have seen a significant increase in all forms of forced displacement, defined by UNHCR as displacement resulting from “persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.”

It does not work to replace ‘paying your debts’ with ‘repairing the harm’, then. Drawing on the work of penal theorist Antony Duff, we suggest the metaphor of “fulfilling a civic obligation” as an alternative tool to guide our responses to crime. Duff argues that, done very differently, “criminal punishment could and should be inclusionary, as something we can do, not to a ‘them’ who are implicitly excluded from the (law-abiding) community of citizens, but to ourselves as full, if imperfect, members of that community.”[15]

Theology turns out to have something significant to say to our young student and to society more widely. It can help us discover that there are ways to get at the injustice of an indebted society that predate Marx and his many descendants.

Debt creates an interdependent relationship between the creditor and the debtor, until the alienation of the latter from the former. Like an addiction, it can lead to alienation from one’s own body.

It is not only when debt is contracted that the ethical dimension is involved, it is throughout the repayment process. The debtor and the lender are not equal. It is not, as we say in economics, a zero sum game. The creditor expects his money to be profitable and to earn interest.

Introduction Over the past decade, climate breakdown has come to be recognised as the greatest threat to human rights. Climate change threatens the right to life, health, food, water, property, education, work, culture, adequate standard of living, means of subsistence, adequate/secure housing, self-determination and a healthy environment. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and… Read more »