By Roberto Catalano, 8th October 2023
The new academic year of Sophia University Institute (IUS) has opened with two full days of introduction. On Monday, 2nd October, we started to get to know each other, professors, staff and students. It was a long presentation, but given the small number it was possible for everyone to speak. It was an important moment which, despite the diversity of roles, immediately contributed to bringing a spirit of fraternity, an indispensable element in Sophia’s style. The shared meal and some interactive moments further contributed to giving a clear direction to the Academic Year that has begun.
The day included two moments of reflection. One was around Chiara Lubich’s founding speech at the ISC, which was inaugurated in the late 1990s and which paved the way for the foundation and opening of Sophia in 2008. Today we a good number of those young people are among our colleagues, and represent the future of our institute. Lubich’s speech, which was given into two moments, followed by group work for an adequate in-depth study, was in all likelihood rather arduous for students who are still struggling with perfecting their Italian. However, what remained, especially thanks to the moments of group work, was the idea of the inspirational spark to which the programmes and the spirit of our university constantly wish to refer.
The following day, was the presentation of the new project that will occupy professors and students for the next three months. It is an absolutely unprecedented and ambitious project. It is a course on which ten professors have been working for months and which seeks to combine an interpretation of human history with science, culture and spirituality. All from a historical perspective. Various blocks mark the development of the programme, which will end at Christmas with daily lessons of five hours and team work on some afternoons. From the outset, a very sincere and interesting dialogue was established with some of the students, enriched as it always is in our Sophia context by cultural and often even religious differences. It promises to be a great challenge, but also a source of surprises given the quality of the group that has presented itself at the beginning of this academic year.
Our academic reality remains small, fragile, very recent in its only fifteen-year history, but, beyond everything, there remains the prophetic dimension that Chiara Lubich enriched it with by founding it and s eeing it come to life only a few months before her death.
8/10/2023 http://whydontwedialogue.blogspot.com/?m=1
