So far, the usual long, hot summer of sectarian tension associated with the marching season in Northern Ireland has passed without a single soldier on the streets. Gradually the old hatreds seem to be diminishing, for which some credit has to go to the Nationalist community's traditional foe, the Orange Order. The Government has proposed turning the annual Orange marches, once the focus of anti-Catholic antagonism, into communal festivals that exclude no one, and the idea seems to match the mood.

Nor is this melting of the Orange iceberg peculiar to Northern Ireland. The Scottish Orange Lodges have devised a welcome scheme to counter the widespread virus of sectarianism by introducing young people from the Protestant communities to those of the same age from elsewhere, mostly Catholics but also from other faiths. On page 12 of this edition of The Tablet the foremost Scottish composer, James MacMillan, reassesses "Scotland's shame" - sectarian hatred - seven years after he notably drew attention to it in a lecture at the Edinburgh Festival. It is, he says with relief, declining at last.

Not the least of the reasons seems to be the willingness of the Scottish Executive, led by First Minister Jack McConnell, to admit that it exists. It is clear from James MacMillan's account of what happened after his Edinburgh lecture that the country's establishment and media had been in serious denial. Many intelligent and educated people, including some leaders of the Church of Scotland, were refusing to admit that religious hatred could still exist in modern Scotland.

The problem was thus not just sectarianism, but sectarianism denied. Persistent attacks on the Scottish Catholic school system could be represented as liberal and anti-sectarian when they were in fact driven by unacknowledged anti-Catholic prejudice. As long as this continued, the full force of peer-group pressure could not be mobilised to stop it, as has happened against racism ...

The citizens of Britain, like those of other Western countries, think it normal to fly abroad on holiday, sometimes several times a year. They think it normal for families to own several cars. They timetable their lives around rapid travel and high consumption of energy. This week the Anglican Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, asked them to consider what they are doing to the planet. Climate change is accelerating ...