News
The World Council of Churches (WCC) gives thanks for the life and work of renowned academic, theologian and political analyst Dr Ninan Koshy. A former executive secretary and director of the WCC’s Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), Koshy died at the age of 81 in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India on 4 March.
“He has left an indelible mark on the WCC and the wider ecumenical movement with his incisive analyses of global issues and his theological insights on the churches’ responsibility to witness for truth, justice and peace in a deeply troubled world,” said the WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit in an official tribute to Koshy issued from the WCC on 6 March.
“The WCC and the worldwide ecumenical movement to which Dr Koshy devoted so much of his life mourns his passing,” Tveit added.
Koshy joined the CCIA staff in 1974, and served as its director from 1981 to 1991. In Geneva his work focused on issues of militarization and armaments race, where he organized a series of international ecumenical consultations that broke new grounds in identifying militarization as an underlying cause of war and conflict. The definition of militarism developed there was subsequently applied by the United Nations in its Commission on Human Rights. At a critical moment in the nuclear arms race Koshy organized, together with Paul Abrecht, director of the WCC Department of Church and Society, the Public Hearing on Nuclear Weapons and Disarmament held in 1981, and co-edited its report, Before It’s Too Late. The former WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Philip Potter reported its findings directly to the plenary of Second Special Session of the UN General Assembly on Disarmament in New York in 1982 where they proved to be influential.
