Viewpoint: Why the world needs faith

Chine McDonald

In her first blog as Director of Theos think tank, Chine McDonald explains why she is convinced the world needs to pay attention to faith and belief.

In November 2008, I stood in the dust of the tracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau - the site where more than a million people were murdered during the Holocaust. I had joined a group of other journalists covering faith and religion, alongside schoolchildren invited by the Holocaust Education Trust to join the leaders of the nine largest religions in the UK on this historic occasion.

The group of faith leaders, including the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, led a moving candle-lit vigil on the tracks after we had spent the day hearing and seeing with our own eyes the horrors that had once occurred in that place.

As I think back to that moment, standing at Auschwitz, I am convinced that faith and belief can speak meaningfully into those profound existential events in ways that other things can't; those times in which we wrestle with such atrocities and ask big questions about our humanity and its nature. It's fair of course to ask whether beliefs and world views are themselves to blame for some of the greatest atrocities we have seen in human history.

To read on see: www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2022/01/06/new-director-blog?fbclid=IwAR218TZbFPRl6KqaMS7HQnvxqj7cx5OsErBbV7jtY-MOxcizx_5mWVFU2bY