It is of faith that ‘all things work together for good for those who love God’ (Romans 8:28). But the engagement with religious otherness is not always a matter of expansive exhilaration. As Rowan Williams once put it, the world contains not just ‘well-meaning agnostics’—or indeed enlightened devotees of other faith traditions—but also ‘totalitarian nightmares … nuclear arsenals, labour camps and torture chambers’. In their openness to the Muslim world of Algeria, the Trappist martyrs were rendering themselves vulnerable to violent attack; and we can easily forget that Ignatius and the early Jesuits lived, not very creatively, with the threat of being overwhelmed by the Turks. To explore the world’s differences is also to engage with the world’s evil. It is only in hope and trust that we can move forward in this enterprise—hope not only in the Spirit’s expansive creativity, but also in the power of God to bring good out of evil and life out of death.
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