World Council of Churches (WCC) progamme director for Public Witness and Diakonia Rev. Dr Kenneth Mtata offered a keynote address at a conference for the Diakonia Region Africa-Europe of the World Federation of Diaconal Associations and Diaconal Communities.
Unless the efforts of youth are mobilized for institutional change, their efforts to live sustainably, ethically, and mindful of consumption will not have an impact, warned Ruth Mathen, delegate of Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, during a WCC assembly press conference on 5 September.
Participants at a symposium exploring challenges and opportunities for a more just digital future held a lively discussion on and offline on how the digital era has changed the notion of public space.
Besides the dangerous monopoly structures in the digital economy, there is a danger for liberty and justice as they are crucial for pluralistic democracies in the digital world, says Dr Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria. Bedford-Strohm is also chairperson of the council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and was a keynote speaker at the opening of the symposium exploring challenges and opportunities for a more just digital future, in Berlin on 13-15 September, and co-organized by the EKD.
As a teenager growing up in East Germany in the 1980s, Dr Ellen Ueberschär learned of freedom of speech in her church parish and believes that fundamental digital rights will not prevail on their own or through voluntary commitments by corporations.
Thirty years ago, on 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, the Nicolaikirche in Leipzig had gained a reputation as a gathering point for events signalling the end of an era of communist rule in what was then East Germany.
The World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) was featured in the DW Global Media Forum held 27-28 May in Bonn, Germany. More than 2,000 media professionals, policymakers, and movers from politics and civil society, culture and education, business and science – representing 140 countries – attended the conference.
The WACC-SIGNIS Human Rights Award 2016 has gone to the documentary film Cahier africain directed by Heidi Specogna, who was recognized at an awards ceremony on 19 February in Berlin.
