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Letters – February 2026

Submit a letter for consideration about this month’s edition by emailing the Editors: Miss Hardeep Matharu and Mr Peter Jukes on letters@bylinetimes.com

Organising Feeling

James Bloodworth’s thoughtful essay (‘Beyond Nostalgia: The Left Needs a Lasting Vision Our Lost Society Can Latch On To’, 11 December 2025) is right to diagnose a crisis of meaning as the heart of the problem for the pluralist left. Yet, I question whether religion is merely another “version of unreality”, grouped alongside consumerism and virtual escapism.

As I understand Christianity, it does not begin as a political programme (contra the populist right), nor as a consoling fantasy (contra New Atheism), but as a shared moral and social imagination.

Long before politics became a spectacle of feeling, Christianity organised feeling around the idea that the good life was something learned together rather than consumed alone.

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Notes on Now – Beating Trump

When his Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, told CNN that the UScan take Greenland, because the “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” are that it is controlled by strength, force, and power, he was not just wrong, he exposed a complete absence of any values or beliefs. Such hollowness isn’t popular and won’t triumph.
Anthony Barnett

Zeitgeisters – Carissa Véliz

If you are feeling overwhelmed or exhausted by the debates raging over the power of Big Tech and the seemingly impossible task of reversing the intrusions of surveillance capitalism, the work of Carissa Véliz will come as a welcome blast of courageous common sense.
John Mitchinson