On a cool evening in early spring 2014, a group of 50 people donned blue t-shirts and assembled on the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the headquarters of a well-known U.S. bank. The group held candles, and several customers told stories of predatory lending, disorganization and negligence that resulted in increasing debt and unjust foreclosures, especially in communities of color. Verjie, a nurse’s assistant, spoke through a megaphone. He has lived in the Cambria Heights neighborhood of Queens, New...
A useless experience? It is a common opinion that the spiritual life and the hours spent in retreat, as in the case of the Spiritual Exercises, are basically a waste of time and energy that could be better devoted to more useful and profitable activities. On the other hand, some try to use it for “well-being,” to obtain the serenity promised in vain by drugs or by a carefree life. They soon abandon it when results of a completely different...
Mozambique lies on the east coast of Africa and “looks out” toward Madagascar and the Indian Ocean.[1] It is a member of the Southern African Development Community, a group of nations with a combined population of 250 million people. According to demographics experts this will become almost half a billion in the next 20 years.[2] Mozambique’s ports provide a trade gateway for several sub-Saharan African nations, making it very important in the region from a strategic-commercial point of view. Until...
Anthropological relevance of reconciliation The term reconciliation offers a splendid insight into our relational character as humans. Reconciliation always presupposes a preceding relational rupture. It is well known that contemporary philosophical reflection, thanks above all to personalism, has widely re-evaluated the notion of relationship, putting it in connection with that of identity and thus making a decisive contribution to overcoming interpretations of identity uncritically based on modern individualism and subjectivism, which understandably struggled to account for the anthropological relevance of...
In the summer of 2015, three-year-old Alan Kurdi was found dead on a Turkish beach. His Syrian family had fled their war-torn homeland. The image of that drowned child in the arms of a soldier disturbed us all. In the fall of 2018, seven-year-old Amal Hussain died of a deadly disease: hunger. Her photograph appeared in The New York Times: undernourished, she lay waiting for death, without even the strength to cry. Amal was in a health center where the...
A century ago, on July 31, 1919, Primo Levi, writer, witness and “martyr” of the Holocaust, was born in Turin.[1] After graduating in chemistry, he worked in that profession before and after his dramatic experience of the concentration camp. He was also a partisan, and was captured as one, sent to the camp of Fòssoli, near Modena, because he was a Jew, and then was sent to Auschwitz in March 1944. He was 24 years old and remained there for...
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