Barmen is in Germany, now one half of the twin city of Barmen-Elberfeld. It was in Barmen that the confessing church, at its first synod in May 1934, made the now celebrated Barmen Declaration and drew a line in the sand against the encroachments of national socialism.

Belhar is in South Africa, and gives its name to the equally celebrated Belhar Confession, adopted in 1986 by the then Dutch Reformed Mission Church, which drew its own line against apartheid and the theological heresies that sought to defend it.

Cape Town fails to make it to our cover on grounds of alliteration, but it is where a group of theologians from the Reformed family gathered in March 2001 to look at what Barmen and Belhar have to tell us as we try to confess our faith in the face of worldwide economic injustice and environmental degradation. We will publish the report of their findings later.

Faith is not just to be confessed, however, but to be celebrated; not just to be proclaimed, but to be performed. Worship in the context of confession was also on the Cape Town agenda, and Drea Fröchtling's moving paper on this topic is included here.

Budapest was at the centre of the Hungarian rising in 1956, when young men with pistols and rifles battled Soviet tanks: when the shooting stopped, 3,000 Soviet troops and 20,000 Hungarians lay dead.

Less dramatically, Budapest is where Reformed Christians from central and eastern Europe gathered in June 2001, together with Orthodox, Protestant and Roman Catholic sisters and brothers, to draw up an ecological, economic and social balance sheet of the years since communism fell and to consider the impact of globalization on their region.

"About a decade ago," they said, "we, the peoples and churches in central and eastern Europe, rejoiced as we realized that we were free. It was as if a deep shadow had passed by and full daylight had returned."

"As if..." is about right. As Robert McIntyre says, people in the region may have gained greater political freedom, but they have paid a heavy price: the human costs have been dramatic. In 1989, about 14 million people in the area lived on less than four dollars a day. By the mid-nineties, the number had risen to 147 million, while a small minority had made itself excessively, and often criminally, rich.

McIntyre's article - a greatly condensed version of the paper he presented in Budapest - is detailed and at points technical, but should prove of interest to readers within and beyond the region.

Also included in this issue is a sermon preached by Gusztáv Bölcskei, presiding bishop of the Reformed Church in Hungary, at the time of the consultation.

Holland, Michigan, in the USA is where the Warc executive committee met at the end of July 2001. Alphabetically it is even further removed from our cover than Cape Town.

But Holland, Michigan, is where the committee surveyed progress in our Reformed journey towards covenanting for justice in the economy and the earth.

The paper by Karen Lebacqz printed here was an input to that discussion, asking in pointed fashion how we can make universal judgements without riding roughshod over the cultures and convictions of others. Is there, in other words, a third option beyond hegemony - traditionally, it need hardly be added, western - and postmodernist relativism?

Warc would like to think so.

Páraic Réamonn