My intention was to propose a new cultural approach to dialogue between cultures which
might be useful for the following years if they apply it to dialogue among disciplines.
Furthermore this approach may help them in the future, first as people then as
missionaries, wherever they go.
We did not give birth to a new culture or to a mixture of six different cultures. It was not an
exercise in collecting the values that are common to every culture in an obstinate or
ingenuous way, nor an effort to know something of the different cultures in a short space of
time. If we were able to apply transdisciplinarity well to this course, as teacher and as
students, perhaps we might have the chance to find common ground for dialogue between
us, between cultures and disciplines.
I do not yet know if we have applied transdisciplinarity well. I can say that we tried to allow
it to work, lesson by lesson. What I felt was a growing awareness in everybody, in their
personal way, to better understand and meet the other. There was a growing desire to
know more about the other’s culture and to dialogue.
This awareness continues also now, as they wrote me by e-mail, during the second
semester, with other courses and among the students.
Most of them are strongly motivated to meet the other for their choice of life. The challenge
could be to discover what would happen if the students were not religious or even
believers. Two of them are believers but not religious. They behaved in the same way:
sometimes the only difference I saw between them was that they did not wear habits.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the Director of the St. Peter’s Theological Institute, Father Salvatore Currò,
to have proposed this challenge to me and to have accepted my proposal with full
confidence. He also reviewed this paper until the final version. Many thanks to all of the
students of the course: without their careful and enthusiastic contribution to every lesson
the dialogue between cultures would not be possible. Special thanks to English dear
friends Margaret Breugelmans and Margie Varrassi who read and corrected this paper
with particular attention and competence as they are both translators.
Bibliography and links
Bibliography
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G. Devoto and G. Oli, Il dizionario della lingua italiana, Le Mounier, Florence 1990;
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African thinking: P. Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, ed. Présence Africaine, Paris 1959, 1969; K. D. Kaunda, A
Humanist in Africa, Nashville, New York, London, 1966; J. S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy,
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Convention