Listen to Editor Ashley Hay in conversation with Sarah Sentilles for Byron Writers Festival.

The word utopia makes me nervous, an uneasiness cultivated by too many years in divinity school listening to people talk about the afterlife. Paradise, heaven, the kingdom of God – for some Christians, the promise of another world encourages the abandonment of this one. Trees, racism, structural poverty, endangered species, climate change, refugees – none of it matters because this world is only temporary, fallen, sinful. Our job is not to repair this world, but to escape it. And how do you escape? Entrance to that afterworld requires only belief.