The Rev Philip Potter, a former general secretary of the World Council of Churches, has been honoured by the South African government for his determined commitment to combatting racism and apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s.

Does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights represent a triumph of the Enlightenment over superstition? Or has it sidelined religion and sought to impose monolithic norms on diverse communities and cultures? Savi Hensman says the reality is more complex than these popular antitheses suggest.

Britain counts itself as a mature democracy. But what really guarantees freedom and fairness, asks Simon Barrow, and how does the church relate to the will of the people in wider society?

The current media-propelled debates about God are mostly hopelessly out of touch with their own intense fallibility, says Simon Barrow. He tries to explain why God-talk will always be helpfully elusive if it is faithful to what it seeks to point to.

The church is running out of justifications for the various anomalies it clings onto, and it is just a matter of time before they go completely, says Jonathan Bartley. We cannot proclaim the message of God's liberating future by clinging to the past.

Ethnic and political divisions have prevented church leaders in Kenya from responding to the political crisis in their country, the main governing body of the WCC has been told by its general secretary, the Rev Samuel Kobia.

Church groups in Europe have welcomed the entry into force of a pan-European convention against human trafficking, and described it as a major step in ensuring the protection of the human rights of trafficked persons in Europe.

Eucharistic sharing and the development of goods in community can help to reshape what we mean by globalisation in a divided and unequal world, says a recent consultation of three Christian Communions.