Giovanni Cucci, SJ

The historical background The ancients were well aware of the many aspects of justice. Reading their texts, one is struck by the great richness and complexity of their perspectives. The very root of the Greek word dikaiosynē (justice), dikē, refers to a multiplicity of operational meanings that concern, first of all, the relationship with God… Read the full article

A forgotten heritage In today’s imagination prudence is mainly associated with careful, considered behavior (for example, driving a car slowly) or with a tendency to be indecisive so as to avoid risks, or worse, with a form of cowardice that prevents someone from taking a stand.[1] These views are largely associated with modern thought. In… Read the full article

One of the effects of the current pandemic has been the calling into question of a general silence on the “ultimate questions.” The nihilistic vision of life, which was made famous by Nietzsche’s philosophy and has frequently returned in updated versions, considers such questions definitively outdated and meaningless. According to this philosophical approach, the truth… Read the full article

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / are of imagination all compact.” This famous claim from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a sort of self-diagnosis of the possible relationship between madness and artistic creativity. It is a relationship that also evidences the structural ambiguity of imagination, poised between these two often coexisting conditions…. Read the full article

Father Timothy Radcliffe, who was Master General of the Dominicans, has presented the relationship between faith and culture in these terms: “I grew up in a Catholic subculture that interpreted existence and the world in terms of gratitude and blessing. We believed in a God who heard our prayers, who loved us, and who at… Read the full article

Imagination, the engine of history Imagination is a theme that, in the course of recent decades, has become more and more the object of discussion, not only in literary and artistic terms, but also in historiographic, scientific and interpretative ones, since it is considered as the true driving force of the journey of humanity. This… Read the full article

The discomfort of fragmentation A peculiar characteristic of today’s so-called “Postmodern” era is the absence of global narratives. This is the basic hypothesis of the famous book by Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, published in 1979. Lyotard pointed out that, from a cultural point of view, the so-called “Modern” era, characterized… Read the full article

A project born from afar In his Message for the Launch of the Educational Pact, dated September 12, 2019, Pope Francis invited all those working in the field of education at different levels (academic, institutional, pastoral and social) to Rome on May 14, 2020, to work together to develop a global educational pact. The event… Read the full article