INTENT

 

- Symposium ROAA 2015 -

 

          This year the Symposium, organized in collaboration with the Laval University – Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies and Canadian Center for ecumenism, having the title “Gospel, Christian Faith and Institutions – past, present and future”, follows the general intent of this event to become a forum bringing together pertinent Christian ideas and initiatives that have stood the test of time and which, if not totally at least partially, are at the bottom of our vision of institutional organization.

 

           The Symposium is intended to be a bridge between two institutions – Church and University – which marked and still mark our spiritual and social space through imagination and action. 

 

           As the title of this year announces, the symposium will concentrate on the way in which the Gospel’s teaching and the Christian faith as spiritual experience generated a social and human dynamic embodied in institutions as university, religious and charitable institutions etc. promoting the human and scientific teaching and knowledge, the social justice for all and a holistic vision of social-human space, the respect for each person’s life in all its spiritual, cultural and material complexity, the peace and social harmony, a democratic debate in which all levels of the society would be represented.

 

            In this sense the guest-speakers are invited to choose biblical, historical, social or ethical topics of Christian inspiration, which are relevant to this from historical and contemporary debates standpoint. A special regard will be granted on those topics, which contain a potential capacity to renew today imaginary and social space.

 

            The different viewpoints will try to enlighten the different contemporary debates and to show the span and the complexity of the notion of human nature as this is proposed by the approach based on the Gospel and faith’s values. In a really democratic spirit we hope that the spiritual, cultural and symbolic values developed by the Church will have the same right of being known as those economic and material.

 

             In a world more and more globalized in which the corporatist factor exercises an increasing influence on the various social areas and in which the human person seems more and more deprived of means to face this pressure, the spirit of the Church institutions bore the mark of a search for dialogical balance between the community systematic-organization aspect and ontologically-personal one needed in all the societies. Maybe, analyzing carefully this sensibility and this dynamic, which is never finished but always to be realizing, that we will find bits of answers for the issues of our time.