Last month I went to Rome. I went to give a paper on the theology of beauty and its relationship to contemporary British nature poets at a conference, titled “The Power of the Word”, which is engaged in getting poetry, theology and philosophy to talk to each other. It was a wonderful rich cross-disciplinary meeting and I met some good people, learned a lot and had a great time, but this is not what I am going to write about now.I went by train. This was not in response to Laudato si’ – though as it happens I gave my paper at precisely the same time as the encyclical was promulgated. A few years ago I committed myself to not flying short-haul (my daughter lives in the United States; I go to Sinai each October – and I decided not to eschew intercontinental flig