Rumours of a Better Country

Hyper-individualism and consumerism are failing to satisfy our hunger for meaning. We face an identity crisis in which real community is increasingly hard to find. The culture wars have been painful and polarising and have proved a poor way to agree any kind of moral standards. Is it even possible to find a vision for goodness that can bring us together?

Rumours of a Better Country addresses our hunger for justice and a better way of living by awakening our moral imagination to the potential of a trusting community. Drawing on ancient wisdom and looking through the lens of daily reality, it shows how trust and trustworthiness must be the foundation for any kind of meaningful freedom.

Through the questions and mysteries of the ‘Café Now and Not Yet’, readers will experience chance encounters with Palestinians in a pub in communist Czechoslovakia, appreciate an intriguing sculpture from Romania and hear post-communist Ukrainians struggling to imagine a better life. Each of these encounters provides a real-life context for a rich and provocative journey into the heart of goodness and why it matters.

During the Cold War, Marsh Moyle and his wife Tuula organised book translation and distribution behind the Iron Curtain. In the post-communist period, they helped people setting up publishing houses across the region, ran a learning community and engaged in research on social issues caused by the changes.

His work both under communism and in the adjustment to democracy and free markets gives him a unique perspective from which to engage with the cultural challenges of today. Marsh now travels and teaches across Europe and works alongside L’Abri, a study centre in southern England.