The Question: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago. What are your memories of that day? What impact did it have on you? How is King relevant to you and to us today?

I was working in the downtown freight shed for the Canadian Pacific Railroad in Toronto when the news came in. (I was in what we call a 'gap year' between high school and starting as an undergraduate at Oxford.)

I have a vivid memory of that day in Toronto: an enormous crowd gathered spontaneously in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, where the (then) new City Hall is, with tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands all singing "We shall overcome", and people leaning out of office windows and the like all round. It was the first time I'd ever been part of that kind of event, and granted that it was 1968 with people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in their heyday there was a sense which I suppose was a kind of secular analogue to what the early church felt about martyrdom -- the blood of the martyrs being the seed of the church, so the blood of MLK was the seed for an 'overcoming' -- though we were perhaps a little hazy as to what that might involve -- which would radically change the society we were in.

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The Question: In his speech to U.S. bishops last week, Pope Benedict XVI said: "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted . . . To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul." Do you agree or disagree? Why?

I was also struck by what the Pope said at the UN, that 'freedom of religion' doesn't just mean 'freedom to worship' -- i.e. to practice one's religion in private away from the public square -- but also freedom to work out its meaning in the public domain. Actually, what he said about 'human rights' in that speech was fascinating, too, and mostly missed by the news media; he didn't just say 'we need to emphasize human rights', but (a) we need to rediscover what the roots of 'human rights' actually are, and (b) we need a nuanced use of 'human rights', because the broad-brush use of that idea doesn't get us anywhere. I summarize and oversimplify; his piece was remarkably subtle and was perhaps calling the UN back to a larger vision of its own task than some of its members would be likely to want. In fact, it was as though he'd been reading Nick Wolterstorff's new book on Justice -- a point I put to Nick in an email and with which he agreed.

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