The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination was a conference held at the headquarters of La Civiltà Cattolica, from May 25-27, 2023. Organized by our magazine together with Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The meeting brought together over 40 poets, storytellers, screenwriters and filmmakers from various countries around the world who identify as Catholic, or who feel that Catholicism has been a formative dimension of their artistic development.[1] Participants engaged in a conversation about the spiritual and religious dimensions of...
Since 1948, the two words “Jew” and “Arab” in the same sentence have widely been understood to refer to polar opposites, suggesting mutual distrust and enmity, war and violence, pointing to a supposedly unbridgeable gap between the two. It is timely to remember that this was not always the case. In reflecting on the history of the Jews in Arab lands, one can say there was an earlier time before Jews were hostile to Arabs, and Arabs hostile to Jews,...
The relationship between the brothers Jacob and Esau is shot through with dramatic tension: manipulation and deceit, violence and forced separation, conflict and unexpected rapprochement. So it seems fair to ask: Where is God in all this? How do we recognize him in these often controversial and unsubtle human stories? Yet it is precisely on the stage of life that the Bible stages the drama of family relationships and the unexpected possibility of finding the face of God in the...
“I think that the study of theology is of the greatest importance. It is an indispensable service to the Church.”[1] The past ten years of the papacy of Pope Francis have been a time of extraordinary activity and challenge for the Church. Whether involved with internal renewal and synodality, with the urgency of apostolic outreach to other faiths, or opposing conflicts and the ever-widening consequences of the ecological crisis, the pope has been concerned with the Church’s mission. His easy...
On June 20, 2017, after visiting the tomb of Fr. Primo Mazzolari, Pope Francis went to the cemetery in Barbiana, the resting place of Fr. Lorenzo Milani, another challenging prophet of our time. There they were facing each other: Francis and Lorenzo, in silence. With the pope praying alone, it was almost a showdown. The pope had recently freed from censorship Don Lorenzo’s book, Pastoral Experiences.[1] In a message for the publication of his Opera Omnia,[2] he had made it...
In Beijing on March 10, 2023, representatives of Iran and Saudi Arabia signed an agreement in which they pledged to restore diplomatic relations within two months. These had been disrupted in 2016 after Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Tehran was attacked following the execution of Shiite cleric, Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, in Saudi Arabia. The full import of this event becomes clear when one considers what happened just under five years ago, on September 22, 2018, and soon after. A military parade...
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