On Wednesday, November 15, 2017, the third edition of the “Days of Conscience and Freedom” took place in the parliamentary hall of the Senate Library.
The convention was designed to sensitize institutional and religious figures to themes that the magazine Coscienza e Libertà examines and records in depth, while it promotes a more diffused cultural and political awareness about values such as the secularity of institutions, along with defense and promotion of the rights of religion, conscience, and citizenship. Coscienza e Libertà is the official figure of the International Association for the Defense of Religious Liberty (Aidlr).
The theme central to the discussion held by the prestigious speakers in the three distinct panels was thus named “The care of the polis (community) and the public role of religion, between traditional values and new structures”.
The first panel, titled “The primacy of politics”, was presented in four reports: Flaminia Saccà (University of Tuscia), Luciano Violante (former President of the Chamber), Monica Simeoni (University of Sannio) and Mauro Calise (University of Napoli Federico II), all of which were moderated by the director of the magazine Coscienza e Libertà, Davide Romano. The speakers, although presenting from different perspectives, strongly underlined the need to return to good politics: politics that will enhance skills, as well as promote the study and consideration of the extreme complexity of social phenomena, while avoiding excessive or deceptive semplifications.
The second panel, entitled “The contribution of religion”, simultaneously promoted and contemplated the contribution that religious communities can offer in the post-secular, and maybe fluid but not necessarily post-ideological, public arena. The discussion, moderated by reporter Gaelle Courtens, was presented through reports by Elena Bein Ricco (philosopher of politics), Raffaella Di Marzio (Lirec, expert in new religious movements), Pasquale Annicchino (European University Institute, Bruno Kessler Foundation) and Paolo Naso (University of Rome La Sapienza).
In the third, and last, panel there was a real debate between religious and institutional representatives. Beginning with a greeting by Prefect Maria Giovanna Iurato (Ministry of the Interior), there was an interchange between the following figures:
Honourable Gessica Rostellato and Luigi Lacquaniti, Senator Lucio Malan, Izzedin Elzir (president of UCOII), Maria Angela Falà (president of the Inter-Religious Table of Rome), Giacomo Ciccone (president of the Italian Evangelical Alliance), Carmine Napolitano (president of the Pentecostal Faculty of Religious Sciences), Christiane Groeben (vice president of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy), and Giuseppe Cupertino (national secretary for the Christian Adventist Church). The interchange was moderated by Dora Bognandi (national secretary of Aidlr, Italian chapter).
The impression that emerged from these three thematic panels that formed the entire convention was that of constructive and fruitful discussion between different disciplines, social sectors, and institutions. It was a discussion that should be maintained with continually redefined methods and durations, a discussion that the magazine Coscienza e Libertà has offered to document. Liberal democracy nourishes itself and evolves only through coherent discussion of ideas and visions, in which each person, without ceasing to represent a specific point of view, listens to and appreciates other views of the world. More than this is not expected but less than this, in this case, is the enemy of the greater good.
pictures: Andreas Mazza
