I'll never forget the first time I encountered homeless people begging on the streets. I was a student visiting Rome during an Easter vacation and walking down the Via Del Corso in the heart of the city's shopping district.

At one point, as we were working on the cover of this issue, we had a photograph of some worshippers with the title The New Evangelicals, referring to a new thrust of evangelicalism in the United States on social issues, particularly poverty.

Christmas is the time when we celebrate the Prince of Peace. But few people in this world live in real peace. What are we to do about it?

Authority comes in at least two guises. The first is given to a person by an organization through position and responsibility. The second is an inner gift or charism. Rev. Carey Nieuwhof was given authority by the Presbyterian Church when he was ordained a minister of word and sacrament and called to Trinity, Oro. The latter is a gift he has in spades: Tall, eloquent and bright, he is a charismatic presence leading worship.

A few weeks ago I spotted a small story in the newspaper about an imam in Lebanon issuing a fatwa banning so-called honour killings—the murder of a close female relative by a male for an alleged sexual crime.

Reading an issue of the Presbyterian Record such as this one leaves me with such mixed emotions: joyous amazement at the vitality and accomplishments of youth in their church and community, and frustrated bewilderment that despite their proven abilities, some of them find their voices are limited or shut out altogether in the church's decision-making bodies. As one writer (p. 20) puts it:

The pun opportunities are endless for describing the General Assembly debate over the moderator's stole: Should each new moderator wear the same symbolic stole? Who would pay for it? Who would clean it? Should there be more than one? But that's the only smile in the story. In the end, it was a headshaking event to see approximately 300 commissioners inventing yet another camel: will that be one lump or two?

I recently took a personality indicator test widely used to help people understand themselves and others a bit better. It's the fourth time I've taken one of these, of which there are several different types, in the past 20 or so years. The test is a non-judgemental exercise that places each individual on a grid relative to others giving an indication of preferences for things like, say, whether you get energized from being with others or by yourself or whether you prefer a more orderly life to spontaneity.

According to a native adage, you have to walk a mile in another person's moccasins before you can understand them. No one said how far you have to walk to understand their pain if you take their moccasins away. • Our cover story, Sharing the Pain, is an attempt to reveal some of the pain caused by residential schools and some of the ways the church is trying to address it.

Hero, fool or traitor? Those are now the three possibilities for Judas, the onetime apostle, based on the Bible and a recently published text.

In 1866, as the Fathers of Confederation were working on drafting the British North America Act that would lead to the creation of Canada the following year, a Montreal businessman and journalist, James Croil, was appointed an agent of the Presbyterian synod in connection with the Church of Scotland “to devise

Get some Christians talking about their faith and sooner or later the question is raised: how do I live out my faith in the world? What can I do to make a difference? It's a way of talking about Christian mission—knowing we are loved by God and proclaiming that love to the world.

At the recent international AIDS conference held in Toronto, speaker after speaker pointed out that AIDS need not be nearly so widespread and destructive as it is. • Why then is AIDS so widespread and spreading? • The answer you get depends on who you ask, as Andrew Faiz's in-depth report in this issue reveals. Some people blame poverty, some politics. Some point fingers at homosexuals, others at prostitutes and intravenous drug users.

Once upon a time in the Friendly Forest there lived a lamb who loved to graze and frolic. One day, a tiger came to the […]

Stories are the heartbeat of human civilization. Philosophy, politics and economics may define an age academically, but our heart and soul go to Hector, Hamlet, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. • So too, the most popular parts of the Bible are the stories of Moses and Joshua, the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, whose tales of plagues and crumbling walls, of sin and redemption move us in ways far beyond the complexities of Pauline theology, however important it may be.

It takes an Internet search engine a quarter of a second to locate more than 32,000 references to the phrase “crisis or opportunity,” probably about the same time it took Henry Kissinger to come up with the quip, “There cannot be a crisis next week; my schedule is already full.”

It takes an Internet search engine a quarter of a second to locate more than 32,000 references to the phrase “crisis or opportunity,” probably about the same time it took Henry Kissinger to come up with the quip, “There cannot be a crisis next week; my schedule is already full.”

In the first creation story in Genesis, God puts responsibility for creation in the hands of humans, the creatures fashioned in the divine image. It is an awesome responsibility and one that we haven't always done well. . Over the next 50 years Canada is set to become one of world's largest exporters of crude, the Alberta tar sands being the second-largest known oil reserves on the planet. Western oil is Canada's pension-plan portfolio. There's just one problem: global warming.

Recently at church the preacher was expounding on the baptism of Jesus in the context of four infant baptisms. She pointed out that parents' love for their children begins even before they are born, then blossoms at birth, even though infants cannot possibly return that love.

When Socrates opined in the Republic that "justice is the right ordering of the parts" he was in part saying that justice is frequently complex, with many parts that need to be balanced and given their due. One of the first tests of human maturity, for instance, is the ability to weigh the question of whether a person too poor to pay for food is really stealing if they take food without paying in order to live. Below a certain age (often well into our teens) we are unable to get past having been taught that stealing is wrong. Period. We sometimes forget that point, perhaps because there are so many parts to order correctly. Where human motives are involved, justice is rarely simple, but it must be done and be seen to be done.