New City Magazine: August-September 2008

I have had the current issue of New City for about a week now, but the great "tidy up" of the office has hindered my commenting on it until now.

The first article to catch my attention is entitled "Many Voices, One Idea", and reports on a congress held in Liverpool in June.

The Big Hope was a unique congress for young peole from all over the world, held at Liverpool Hope University from 4-11 June. The objective was to bring together leaders of the future to consider the much needed inter-connection between personal integrity and public life and to consider how to develop a humane global society.

The Big Hope Declaration which was signed by the delegates at the end of the Congress recognised that "individual personal responsibility is a vital element of developing a more humane and sustainable global society". It also contained a commitment to both "personal and public integrity and accountability, honesty and transparency of motive, and ... to uphold the highest standards of probity and respect for others". In a week that has seen a certain Mr Mosley win a court case in which behaviour of a sexually licentious manner was considered his own private matter and of no import for his public life, this assertion of the need for a consonance of personal integrity with public integrity is not trivial.

An interesting quote from one of the participants in the Congress was the following: "Also I realise it is not enough to only accept another religion, or culture, we have to embrace it as our own". At first sight, this appears to be religious indifferentism or syncretism writ large. However, I know that indifferentism does not sit well with the authentic living of Focolare's charism of unity. If we assume that this remark is not made with a religiously indifferent intent, then it does express the kind of empathy (in a technical, philosophical sense) with other religious beliefs that we would seek to achieve through inter-religious dialogue. Understood in this way, the phrase "embrace it as our own" does not mean that we accept the religion of the other as true in some way alongside our own; but it does mean that we try to "enter in to it" as we come to know it, rather than just knowing about it "from the outside", in a cold, unengaged sort of way.