Each year students from all over the world arrive at Bossey near Geneva for a three-month language training course to pave their way for ecumenical studies that follow on straight after. “The title captures the goal of the course,” says Father Lawrence Iwuamadi, the Nigerian priest who studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and is academic dean of the Ecumenical Institute.
It is time to revitalize the Asian ecumenical movement to respond to contemporary realities in Asia, according to Mathews George Chunakara, general secretary of the Christian Conference of Asia, in the article that opens the latest issue of The Ecumenical Review, the quarterly journal of the WCC.
An interreligious consultation on “Voices of Hope for a New Era” has called for enhanced collaboration between Buddhists and Christians in a spirit of humility and honesty and in service of a shared humanity.
From Paris to Pakistan, Orlando to Myanmar, Iraq to Nigeria, each day witnesses conflict and violence perpetrated in the name of religion or committed against persons because of their religious identity.
Violence in the name of religion echoed in the distance, demanding a response, through the November 2015 meeting of the 25-member Executive Committee of the WCC in Bogis-Bossey and nearby Geneva, Switzerland as it planned the work of the Council in the coming years.
Young ecumenical leaders from Asia have met in Siam Reap, Cambodia to examine how religious traditions can offer resources to overcome religious violence in a changing Asian context.