Based upon conversations recorded by a French journalist, this book mixes autobiographical reflections with a critique of the contemporary state of the Middle East. It tells the stories of many individuals working for peace and of his own work, especially with children and students of the school and college he has founded. Fr Elias Chacour, author of the bestselling books Blood Brothers and We Belong to the Land, is the Archbishop of Galilee. Seeing the lack of educational opportunities for Palestinian youth, he created a school open to all local children which opened in the early 1980s. The Mar Elias Educational Institution and now caters for 4,500 students, representing all major religions and ethnicities in Israel. Fr Chacour has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times and has received other prestigious peace awards.

It has come to be taken for granted that churches should issue reports and make statements on public affairs - anything from unemployment to prisons, urban deprivation to the Internet. In theory their conclusions are based on "theology"; in practice they rely more on simple appeals to justice, compassion and human rights. The author examines a number of such reports issued over the last 15 years and finds their "theology" to have made little contribution to their generally sensible, if not always exciting, recommendations. Instead, he argues that they should openly acknowledge thier debt to an ethical consensus which is still widely accepted, should be alerted to the insidious influence of fashionable dogmas, and should re-fashion their understanding of human beings so as to counter the pervasive individualism of recent centuries. In this way, the churches, along with other faith communities, can still make a valid contribution to "civil society" today.