The New Socio-Cultural Paradigms and the Role of Jesuit Universities
The New Socio-Cultural Paradigms and the Role of Jesuit Universities Card. GIANFRANCO RAVASI A PREMISE The very word “university” philologically implies the task of embracing the “universe” of knowledge we are immersed in, and the quest to lead a great variety of knowledges into a “unity.” So universities, with their various faculties, departments, institutions, laboratories and so on, must always be careful to look both to the great heritage of the past and to the present time with its cultural paradigm shifts. We wish, here, to raise two different issues from a methodological point of view. The first is particularly significant within the horizon of the Jesuit universities. In a speech to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2016, Pope Francis proposed an “ancient saying that illustrates the dynamics of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, that is: deformata reformare, reformata conformare, conformata confirmare, confirmata transformare.” It is clear that there is a need for evolution and continuity in this process, for a dialogue with the past and an encounter with the present, for dialectics but also continuity, for changeable complexity and a basic single project. This is something raised by another voice – that of a personality quite different from Pope Francis – who based himself on the contemporary situation. Just before he died in 2011, Steve Jobs, the acclaimed founder of “Apple,” made a declaration that can be taken as his ideal testament: “Technology alone is not 2 enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.” Practically, this was the symbolic synthesis of one of his earlier speeches, given June 12, 2005, at the university of Harvard.
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