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The need for a "theology of healing" was the central theme of a recent international encounter between Orthodox women and Christians of both sexes from other traditions.

It was a deeply moving experience for the Living Letters team visiting Nigeria on behalf of the World Council of Churches (WCC) when they gathered to pray around a mass grave in Dogonahawa, near Jos, in the Central Plateau State on Tuesday. About 323 locals murdered last March have been buried at the site.

by Karen Burke (*)

As the United Nations has made a small but significant step forward towards declaring caste-based discrimination a human rights violation, Indian Christian leaders have called on the churches to confess that the caste system is still being practised also within them.

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Any solution to the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) must engage the whole nation – not just the eastern region where violence is centred, a small ecumenical team visiting the Bas Congo and Kasai Oriental provinces has learned.

By Fredrick Nzwili (*)

In a speech in Kinshasa on 13 July, Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia, the general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), challenged churches to end their denial of violence against women. "The churches still seem to relegate violence to the private sphere, and still understand violence as only physical," he said.

By Emma Halgren (*)

Recounting stories such as the alleged forced poisoning of a young couple, speakers at the Global Ecumenical Conference on Justice for Dalits which opened in Bangkok, Thailand, on 21 March gave a face to the 3,500-year-old system of caste-based discrimination, detailing practices many would consider unthinkable in the 21st century.

Some forty-five religious, interfaith, and value-based organizations from five continents agreed to form a coalition to advance a "United Nations Decade for Inter-religious and Intercultural Dialogue, Understanding, and Cooperation for Peace." Coalition members expressed the hope that the UN Sixty-Fourth General Assembly, which will begin its deliberations in September 2009, will approve a resolution establishing such a decade from 2011-2020.

By Henrik Hansson (*)

In Liberia, Sierra Leone and South Africa, churches have played a major role in reconciliation between groups who had been in violent conflict with each other for decades. Two international ecumenical teams sent by the World Council of Churches (WCC) will visit the three countries during the next two weeks.

German churches' experience with the issue of "domestic violence" will play an important role in a Peace Declaration of the World Council of Churches planned for 2011. "The churches have denied the existence of this issue for a long time", said Georges Lemopoulos, deputy general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), speaking on Saturday 28 June in Frankfurt.

War-torn Sri Lanka is to receive the first of a series of ecumenical "living letters" teams which will visit Christian communities facing situations of violence in different regions of the world in the run up to the 2011 International Ecumenical Peace Convocation being organized by the World Council of Churches.

Local churches in Palestine/Israel are looking to the whole fellowship of the World Council of Churches (WCC) to play a stronger role in supporting local churches' struggles for a just peace there. This is the main finding of a delegation led by the Council's general secretary Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia that visited Palestine/Israel from 21 to 26 June. A new advocacy forum launched prior to the visit, and ecumenical accompaniment are high on the churches' list of actions in pursuit of this goal.

<span style="font-weight: bold; "» Orthodox pre-Assembly meeting

Free photos available, see below

By Nick Kerr (*)