Unusual experience at the UN: talks about Faith and Religions. An article about the public Presentation of Oasis in NY

It is a rather unusual experience for the headquarters of the United Nations in New York to have a Muslim academic, a Rabbi and a Cardinal of the Catholic Church meet to speak about faith and the public role of religions. But such were the contents of the event that involved the presentation of the review Oasis which took place at the Palace of Glass on Wednesday 17 January 2007. The meeting, which went under the title ‘Peoples and Religions’, was opened by Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Permanent Observer of the Holy See at the United Nations. Prof. Carl A. Anderson, a Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus then introduced the three speakers: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a lecturer in Islamic studies at the George Washington University; Israel Singer, the President of the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress; and Angelo Scola, the Patriarch of Venice. The conclusions to the meeting were entrusted to Dr. Roberto Fontolan, the editor of Oasis.

The conference hall, which was filled to the brim with over two hundred people who came to listen – ambassadors, intellectuals, journalists and the merely curious -, found itself face to face with an unexpected consonance between the three speakers, in particular in relation to certain ideas: for example, emphasis on the limitations of declaration of principles which remain only abstract because they are not based on historical reality. ‘Can religious experiences to a certain extent obviate these limitations so as to increase their capacity for social construction and this so as to become protagonists of a suitable promotion of human rights?’, Cardinal Scola asked, ‘I believe that one can give a positive answer to this question. One is dealing here with thinking about relationships between historical subjects that are really at work in our societies, amongst which religions stand out for their singular importance, and the criteria for their possible co-existence’. ‘Here’, continued the Patriarch of Venice, ‘it seems to me to be of fundamental importance to recognise the fact that the humanum as such (the universal dimension) is always and only present in the concrete lives of men and communities (the particular dimension). Thus each community of men, with the cultural expressions that characterise it, is an expression of the universal humanum but it is such in the historically determined cultural forms that are specific to it. Thus the anthropologically structural conditions of a culture are involved which are universal but which live in historical and communal actuations that are always particular’.

Professor Nasr also warned against the danger of establishing a single model for development as a basis for the assessment and evaluation of every expression of the human. This Muslim academic, who on more than one occasion cited Dante with admiration, after being questioned about the current situation in Iran, his homeland, emphasised how intense and little known about is the intellectual debate within Iran and how equally unknown remain those episodes and declarations that express the moderate and majority face of Islam. It was specifically one of these examples that was taken up by Rabbi Singer who read a part of the recent declaration of the Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gom’a, who condemned violence as irreconcilable with the Islam religion and used very severe phrases in relation to terrorists. For the President of the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress, the experience of Oasis, which he has been following for some time, is as surprising in its pathway of growth as the pathway of Christian-Jewish dialogue has been over the last thirty years, which, indeed, has gone beyond every expectation.
The question that underlay the whole meeting was taken up by the Patriarch at the end of his paper: ‘how can men of religions address this fascinating task of social construction in a critical accompanying of the process of the hybridisation of civilisations and cultures? The route that I humbly take the liberty of proposing is that which saw the birth of the review Oasis and the Centre that promotes it. We may identify it in the subject of witness, understanding this category in all its theoretical and practical force. Witness calls on every man and every woman, inviting them to put themselves forward, to pay in person, and not to decide beforehand the point one can reach through encounter and dialogue with another person. No man can withdraw from witness because of the risk implied by freedom which can never be defined a priori. Human freedom can never be ‘deduced’, its full meaning only emerges in the act that performs it’.
‘Oasis’, the Patriarch declared, ending his paper, ‘wants to follow roads marked by witness, They are not completely identifiable a priori. For this reason Oasis is a building site that is always open’.