The suicide bomb attack in Manchester on Monday, May 22, was the worst terrorist atrocity to strike the UK since the London multiple bomb attack in 2005. A terrorist detonated a suitcase bomb at the Manchester Arena after an Ariana Grande pop concert. A total of 22 people have died, including an 8-year-old girl, and 59 badly injured people were taken to hospital. The agents were the same in each case: extremist Muslim followers of a violent expression of Islam.

Almost immediately, as the shocked population of Manchester sought to come to terms with what happened, there were those who wanted to find excuses to mitigate the act of terrorism. Some have blamed terrorist attacks on poverty, or the newest cause, “economic inequality.”

Thomas Piketty, the foremost proponent of wealth redistribution today, has said that “terrorism feeds on the powder keg of Middle Eastern inequality, that we [the West] have largely contributed to creating.”

But the Manchester bomber is not an underprivileged victim of inequality. Salman Abedi contacted his mother just before his suicide attack. She is a university graduate from Tripoli University, who is reported to have graduated top of her class, and a nuclear scientist in Libya. He himself...

Although it is often portrayed as the bitter backlash of racist voters, Brexit will allow the UK to shake loose EU regulations and pursue free trade policies that assure the further development, prosperity, and flourishing of the world’s poorest people.

The impending Brexit is often painted, by those who oppose it, as if it will necessarily bring about the end of all kindness and humanity in the UK. Millions will go hungry, children will be forced to work down in the mines, and the sick will be required to resort to herbal remedies for the plagues that sweep the land. It seems impossible, to such critics of British self-government and sovereignty, that the liberal and humanitarian trajectory on which British society has been travelling for a several hundred years, could possibly continue without submission to the European project and its all-consuming aspirations.

As an example, the UK government has indicated that it wishes to use the opportunities provided by Brexit to develop new trade relationships with the developing world. At present the UK is constrained by the European Union, which is a customs union. EU-wide agreements, embodied in the subsidies and regulations of its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), have distorted...

As I was about to begin celebrating the Divine Liturgy of Palm Sunday in the Coptic church I was serving in Great Britain, the first news of the terrorist attack on a church in Tanta, Egypt, started to filter through. Almost as soon as the news started to appear on the BBC website, it seemed that another bombing was being reported at the Cathedral in Alexandria where Pope Tawadros II, the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church, had been praying. The festive atmosphere became rather sober our congregation. Just a few minutes later I received a text message from a friend here in the UK, who had lost a close relative in the bombings that morning. The news was not simply affecting fellow Christians far away, but was an attack on the members of my own church, and had painfully and personally touched even those well known to me.

The Coptic Orthodox community in Egypt represents the indigenous population of Egypt. Indeed, the Coptic language often used in worship, is simply the last form of the language used by the Pharaohs. The modern Coptic Orthodox Church is proud of her history of perseverance in difficult circumstances more than 1,400 years...

In my hometown in the southeast of England, the evidence of generations of philanthropy can be found everywhere. In the middle of the nineteenth century, one of the wealthier residents of the town built some almshouses in his back garden, and then set up a charity which built many more, and they still provide accommodation for more than 150 elderly residents. The local public baths were built at about the same time from the contributions of those who had been successful in the town, and provided the dignity of a regular hot bath to the working people of the community. In 1851, they cost £6,000, which is the equivalent of about £500,000 today. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the first of many schools, funded by the charity of the wealthy, was established with the interest on £2,000 of securities, worth more than £120,000 at the time. At the end of the same century a typhoid epidemic, the largest in the UK, hit the town due to a contamination of the water supply, causing 132 fatalities. Emergency hospitals were opened, staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses, and a charitable fund was established, to support the poorer townsfolk who had been...

It is surely significant that as soon as the people of Aleppo found themselves liberated from the murderous and brutal control of the Islamic State, they gathered together whatever they could and, in the ruins of their city, celebrated Christmas. The Christmas tree had been left unlit since 2012 when ISIS took control, but this year it became a focus of public celebrations of liberty, while the churches were filled with crowds of Christians finally able to keep the Feast of the Nativity in some safety now that government forces had driven ISIS from the city.

Such public celebrations, shared experiences rooted in particular histories and traditions, are a necessary aspect of a healthy society. The Christmas festivities in Aleppo were an expression of the Christian good news of peace on earth through the incarnation of God. But they were also an opportunity for the community as a whole to witness to the liberty which had been restored to them, so that one of the important traditional events of the local calendar could be observed. It is such shared commemorations which define and sustain a society, and the loss of such opportunities cannot help but lead to the weakening...