Review

Art

Culture

Ethics

War & peace

4 November 2025

5 min read

Can we stop killing each other?

How art, theology, and moral imagination confront our oldest instinct

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A 17th Century painting of Moses and the brazen cross.

Luca Giordano, The Brazen Serpent, c.1690, oil on canvas.

Compton Verney, photography by Jamie Woodley.

What more important question can there be for humanity, Jago Cooper, Executive Director of the Sainsbury Centre, asks than ‘Can we stop killing each other?’ The Sainsbury Centre’s radical exhibition programme explores the big issues in contemporary society (see my article ‘Life Is more important than art’) so has rapidly arrived at the point where it is exploring what has wrong with the world when killing occurs and how can we put it right.

Cooper sets out the ground that this series of exhibitions seeks to cover: ‘From interpersonal violence to state level conflict, killing has spread its devastating impact throughout all human cultures across the centuries. Why does this violence occur? And can it be better prevented at a time when increased societal pressures of population growth, resource scarcity, human migration and rapid environmental change make the risk of conflict higher? Every day we read about horrifying acts playing out locally and internationally, but what is the answer to stopping them?’

Can we stop killing each other? includes an installation by Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Anton Forde, a series of new paintings reflecting on the refugee crisis by Ethiopian artist Tesfaye Urgessa; presentations of historical artworks such as Claude Monet’s ‘The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil’, and an exhibition spanning Shakespearean tragedy to Hitchcockian spectacle, which asks questions of violent stage and screen narratives, plus (from November) ‘Seeds of Hate and Hope’ highlighting personal artistic responses to global atrocities, such as genocides, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It starts, however, with a room displaying Biblically themed explorations of this question. ‘Denunciation of Cain’ by G.F. Watts depicts the after-effects of the first murder with Watts viewing Cain as a symbol of ‘reckless, selfish humanity’. A pair of paintings by Luca Giordano then take us deeper into the ambiguities of our human responses to anger and violence. ‘The Brazen Serpent’, tells the story of the Israelites’ journey from Mount Sinai in Egypt to the Promised Land of Canaan. On this journey, a plague of poisonous serpents punishes the Israelites for their disobedience and lack of faith. Moses is instructed by God to make a bronze, or ‘brazen’, serpent that will heal those that repent. The curators ask, ‘Does this portrayal of killing as a punishment set a cultural precedent, or establish a moral code for right and wrong?’ Alongside is ‘The Judgement of Solomon’ in which two women both claim to be the mother of a living child and where the true mother is revealed by means of an order that the child to be cut in half with a sword and shared. The true mother reveals herself as the one who will give the baby away to protect the child’s life. Here, the threat of violence is used to bring about justice.

William Hogarth’s print series The Four Stages of Cruelty, with verses by Reverend James Townley, reveals how violence escalates and shows how a lack of moral supervision can lead to a life of crime. Finally, Matt Collishaw’s series of thirteen photographic works entitled ’Last Meal on Death Row, Texas’ alludes to the number of apostles at the Last Supper while depicting the last meals chosen by condemned prisoners on death row in the state of Texas, United States.

The curators suggest that: ‘The artworks in this gallery, and beyond, suggest that there is a choice between peace and conflict and that moral stories exist to guide us towards making ethical decisions in real life. Art provides a powerful connection through which to experience life at its most chaotic and incomprehensible, enabling us to pause and reflect on the darkest aspects of human existence. It can also create vital opportunities for society to mourn and remember victims of violence, and to come together in acts of healing and repair.’

These images and the Bible stories on which they are based give us more than simple moral guidance, however. They also provide an explanation for the existence of conflict between human beings and reveal God’s subversion of that ingrained human tendency.

In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain is jealous of Abel and kills him as a result. The anthropologist René Girard suggests that this story reveals the way in which we consistently act as human beings. We desire something that is possessed by someone else and become disturbed through our longing for what we don’t have. We resolve our disturbance by creating a scapegoat of the person or people who appear to have or prevent us from having what it is we desire. When the scapegoat is killed, we can gain what we desire and also release the sense of disturbance that we feel.

This scapegoat mechanism becomes expressed in religions involving human sacrifices as scapegoats to appease their gods. In the story told within the pages of scripture, it is out of such religions that Abraham is called to form a people who do not sacrifice other human beings, but instead use animals as their scapegoats and sacrifices. Jesus is later born into this people who have subverted the existing practice of scapegoating and he further subverts this practice because, as he is crucified, God becomes the scapegoat that is killed. Once God’s Son has become the scapegoat, for those who follow him, the scapegoat mechanism is undermined and the scapegoating of others should no longer be possible.

In ‘The Judgement of Solomon’, the threat of violence is used to reveal the desire of the woman who had taken the mother’s child and the self-sacrifice of the true mother. On the cross, the violence meted out to Jesus reveals the full horror of the scapegoating mechanism in the torture and violent death of the wholly innocent one.

Jesus explicitly equated his crucifixion with the raising up of the bronze serpent that brought healing because in that story, when it is raised, as Jesus also was, the image of the source of the poison in the lives of human beings became the source of healing. That is also the promise that Christianity holds out to us in relation to the effect of Jesus’ crucifixion where he becomes sin for us. It heals us of our absolute need to scapegoat and harm others.

Can We Stop Killing Each Other? Sainsbury Centre:

Tiaki Ora ∞ Protecting Life: Anton Forde, 2 August 2025 – 19 April 2026

Eyewitness, 20 September 2025 – 15 February 2026

Roots of Resilience: Tesfaye Urgessa, 20 September 2025 – 15 February 2026

The National Gallery Masterpiece Tour: Reflections on Peace, 20 September 2025 – 11 January 2026

Seeds of Hate and Hope, 28 November 2025 – 17 May 2026

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.