English Script Request

You are listening to a program from BBC Radio 4.

-Tina Beattie, who is professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton, Good Morning.
-Good Morning. I suspect many of us are reeling from too much bad news right now. In Dostoyevsky's great novel "The Brothers Karamazov", Ivan tells his brother, Alyosha, that he's handing back the ticket to God because he doesn't want to be reconciled to a world such as ours. Ivan argues that if God knew that even one child would be tortured as a result of creating the universe, then the price was already too high. This defiant rejection of God is a different kind of atheism from the argument that science has rendered God redundant. There are questions about suffering and violence that have no answer in science and reason, nor in theology and philosophy. Confronted with the reality of human anguish, intellectual debates about the nature of evil are so wide of the mark that they begin to seem almost obscene. Sudden deaths swoops down with annihilating force that can rob us of meaning, whether it's a result of intentional violence, negligence and neglect, or so-called acts of God. Recently, we've seen all three. Violent premeditated attacks on innocent people, claims of negligence over the Grenfell Tower Fire that left so many injured, bereaved, and homeless, and in Portugal the forest fires, seeming acts of God, that also left many dead, wounded, and homeless. Futility and nihilism seem like an appropriate response to such events. But speaking for myself, I remain within the Christian faith, sometimes tenuously, because it teach not only that God is to be found in our neighbor in need, but that the two are inseparable. In "The Brothers Karamazov", Ivan eventually drives himself mad with arguing about the meaning of it all, but Alyosha represents faith. His faith is rooted more in the question of "what can I do to comfort the suffering?" than "what does it all mean?". Over the last few weeks, we've seen again and again the ordinary human goodness that emerges as a response to that question, "what can I do to bring comfort?". People have united across differences of faith and culture to show that love of neighbor is the most meaningful response to suffering. One doesn't need to declare faith and God in order to love one's neighbor, but without love of neighbor, there can be no love of God. Faith becomes real when the compassionate reach out to the broken-hearted cross the void with simple words and acts of kindness. To quote the philosopher Simone Weil, "The love of our neighbor, in all its fullness, simply means being able to say to them, "What are you going through?""

-That was thoughtful and ..., Tina Beattie, professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton.