The last year has been characterized for me by two apparently opposite emotions. On the one hand the pain and grief surrounding the decline and death from cancer of my brother-in-law.

Cardinal Basil Hume, the Archbishop of Westminster, died on 17 June mourned not just by Britain's Roman Catholics but by many of different faiths and of none.

Mike Lowe revisits Poland, ten years after its return to democracy.

In 1988 Rob Parsons gave up his job as a lawyer to help bolster Britain's ailing family life. The founder of Care for the Family talks to Kenneth Noble.

Verwoerd is one of the names most associated with apartheid. William Smook discovers that Wilhelm and Melanie Verwoerd break all the stereotypes.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant and a lecturer in Communication at the University of Technology, Jamaica.

The Pope believes that the Church's 'culture of remembrance' can save the media culture of transitory news from becoming a forgetfulness which corrodes hope.

Campbell Leggat returns to the land of his birth to find out what Scotland's new parliament could mean for Scotland and the UK.

An international group, with experience of facilitating change in their societies, spent a week in April in Israel and Palestine, at the invitation of people who had participated in MRA conferences in Caux, Switzerland.

An all-African conference on how to combat corruption and bring reconciliation to a war-torn continent, organized by MRA, took place in Tanzania in May.

John Bond describes progress towards healing a deep hurt in the soul of Australia.

Laurie Vogel reflects on Michael Ignatieff's recent book on ethnic conflict.