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Even though flood survivors are displaced in some 2,000 relief camps across Kerala in south India, many of them observed the indigenous Malayali festival of Onam on 25 August in whatever way they could. The traditional festival, for thousands, carried an even more poignant meaning because the holiday celebrates the return of joy to the land: the story of the return of King Mahabali, considered to be a very kind and generous ruler, during a “golden period” in Kerala.

As Kerala, the southern state of India, nicknamed “God’s Own Country,” battles one of the worst flood disasters in a century, various religious communities have opened their doors to help homeless people.

Ecumenical diakonia means complementing each other in what we do best: serving our communities, thus bringing visible church unity to the world, agreed participants at an Ecumenical Strategic Forum on Diakonia and Sustainable Development convened by the World Council of Churches (WCC) last week.

The first ever WCC Eco-School on Water, Food and Climate Justice will be held 24 July to 3 August, hosted by the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian Blantyre Synod. Applications are now open with a deadline of 11 June (deadline extended).

Today 35 bishops and church leaders from 20 countries gathered in Munich, Germany to discuss the refugee situation and the role of the churches in Europe.

A high-level ecumenical delegation representing church organizations will arrive in Juba, South Sudan on Friday, 2 May, amidst continuing conflict in the country with an imminent threat of widespread hunger and malnutrition among its people. The delegation will meet with church leaders and government officials, urging immediate actions for peace and reconciliation.

Nearly one hundred representatives of the German member churches of the WCC met from 16 to 18 January at the Evangelical Academy of Loccum in order to share their experiences from the WCC 10th Assembly and to discuss how they would continue their way together on their pilgrimage of justice and peace.

The July 2013 instalment of the quarterly journal The Ecumenical Review contemplates the future, and particularly the future of the WCC beyond its 10th Assembly. The assembly is to take place from 30 October to 8 November.

Church representatives at a recent Oikotree Global Forum in Johannesburg, South Africa stressed the need to support peoples'€™ movements promoting justice in the economy and ecology, a concern, they say, that lies at the heart of the faith.

As a 10-year-old schoolgirl, on 6 August 1945, at 8:15 a.m., Setsuko Thurlow, then Nakamura, suddenly saw a brilliant bluish light flash outside her schoolroom window. “I remember the sensation of floating in the air. When I regained consciousness, in the total darkness and silence, I found myself in the rubble.”

Tuvalu, a Polynesian island nation in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Australia, is home to more than 11,000 people, whose very existence, which at one time was tied to the ocean and its bounty, is now threatened by rising ocean water levels.