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The liberal international order is sick. So said a Financial Times headline, ahead of President Trump’s closing speech to Davos yesterday. For me, the piece – and Donald Trump’s speech - made two things clear: that we are living with increasingly sharp divisions in worldview, and that the current crisis is about deep cracks in the edifice of our economics and our politics. These are not, I think, small stress cracks in the frame of our common life but major cultural subsidence. What Davos plays out on a world stage this week, the collapse of Carillion and spats about the NHS play out domestically. These are faultlines for both the Left and Right. I’ve recently been reading the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in another age of turmoil, the 1930’s. He suggested that a society or an era could be imagined as a single human face. A face marked by its unique experiences. A generation who grow up with adversity – war, financial and cultural insecurity – he claimed, looks different, it shows in their faces and the way they bear their bodies. He thinks this is literally true, but he also means it as a kind of metaphor to get us thinking about the anxieties and hopes that mark any age. Bonhoeffer believed that each generation is haunted by it’s own obsessive political questions – for 1930’s it was questions of authority and autonomy. How would I describe the face of my own generation? Which anxious, obsessive questions shape our public lives now? For Bonhoeffer Christians are meant to be doers: not just diagnosers, but sleeves rolled up. In Flossenburg concentration camp Bonhoeffer gave his life for this vision. He commands his fellow Christians: ‘decide, act’, ‘Come out of your foxholes to where the bullets are whistling by…’ Then he pauses to suggest something that might sound somewhat contradictory. To act well in an age of turmoil we need to own up to our sense of bewilderment and insecurity. It’s like – he says “trying to walk across a sea of floating ice floes, one cannot rest anywhere’, cannot get a strong foothold. So if the liberal international order is sick, we should not be surprised to feel we do not know what to do.. Both politics and faith demand action, and the Bible also recognises what mysteriously and frustratingly hides itself from us, what remains unclear. Bonhoeffer quotes the Old Testament Chronicler who wrote, ‘We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.’ The bravado of Davos doesn't offer much hope of firm footing. But it might help if, as we act, we can have a vision of the face- or faces, divine and human, - towards which we fix our gaze.