Religious freedom was at the centre of the deliberations of the last committee of Oasis which met in Amman, issues in Jordan. This was a valuable opportunity to engage in an in-depth analysis and develop contacts in a way that would otherwise have been impossible. Various articles in these pages come from that very intense meeting in Amman; others were requested specifically. From the whole emerges a conceptual and historical picture of great interest and innovation, which is further enriched by reflections that have been matured through the concrete experiences of the lives of Churches and in dialogue with Muslim believers.    
 

Benedict XVI centred his address at the United Nations (April 2008) around the Universal Declaration of Human rights, which was 'celebrating' the sixtieth anniversary of its approval. Its birthday did not receive the attention that it deserved and were it not for the importance of the address by the Pope it would have passed by in a rather silent and shallow way. In that address, as the Nuncio Celestino Migliore emphasises, religious freedom occupied a neuralgic position. The connection with the Declaration of the Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, is also clear (see here the review on p. 110), a document that one should not only know to the full but which one should also rediscover and give new impetus to.     

Articles, analyses and testimonies from different countries and on different subjects. In this edition: experiences, tendencies and changes amongst young Muslims in Europe, a generation that feels the need to develop a new way of relating to faith; a scholar examines the currents of Islamic studies in the West and proposes an approach that allows going beyond overly personal influences and ideological perspectives; the memory of a historic day in the relationship between the Catholic Church and Sunnite Islam: the visit of King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia to Benedict XVI.     

In the books of this edition: the social doctrine of the Church as a resource of secular and pluralistic society; the Church and religious freedom before and after Dignitatis Humanae; a detailed survey of the relationship between Islam and other religious communities beginning with the Koran and the Sunna: two texts that express the difficulties of Western societies in relation to multiculturalism and bring out its ambiguities and limits; in the form of an interview, now in France as well a text has been published which helps us to know about the Muslim religion in a way that is accessible to everyone; the past and the present of eastern Christians who need to be known about and supported; and between open-mindedness and disquiet, the account of an immigrant Egyptian community in the United States of America. And lastly, to end this section, a look at the cinema of the season.