Religió i cultura

The title of this Booklet joins two words, democracy and culture, that mutually support each other like exhausted travelers in the middle of their journey. The tiredness of the word democracy is due to the fact that it designates a tarnished reality, eroded at its foundations by economic globalization, the power of the great industries, techno-politics and populism. The word culture has arrived at the same state because it has lost critical and Utopian stamina in going from being a noble ideal and an antidote against power to being a vassal.

Beliefs become visible —expressing themselves in ideas or actions— when individuals or communities are subjected to events that disrupt their lives. The thesis of this booklet is that the coronavirus has disrupted contemporary Western beliefs and has become a mirror in which these beliefs are reflected. Belief in nature, belief in humanity, belief in God, and simple unbelief have been the diverse reactions that this pandemic has brought to light. 

In Europe we are witnessing a genuine collapse of the Christian faith. In relatively few decades, a European society with deep Christian cultural roots has become a society in which Christianity is culturally irrelevant. In this booklet the author analyzes this crisis and then explores the conditions that would make a new Christian initiation possible. Such a re-initiation will have to take place from below, from the poor, from the passion of the people, from the great masses of humankind.

In this essay the author proposes ten reasons for involving the world’s religions in the environmental debate. The ten reasons offer important keys for understanding the religious declarations of recent years as valid strategies for personal, institutional, and social transformation. The author seeks to open up the prophetic, ascetical, penitential, apocalyptic, sacramental, soteriological, mystical, wisdom, communitarian, and eschatological dimensions that pervade the spiritual experience of humankind.

This booklet compares the texts contained the book The Teaching of Buddha with the social justice texts of the prophets (culminating in Jesus as one who is “more than prophet”). Despite the differences between the two sets of texts, the author defends the need to understand that they are complementary languages and that neither of them can be maintained or can reach fulfillment without the other. Every outcry of protest that does not flow forth from the interior richness of an authentic “silence” will be “political” but not prophetic.

We cannot understand modern-day Europe without understanding the role played by Luther in the Reformation of the 16th century. That event went far beyond the religious realm and revealed the existence of two cultures, two models of social relations, two manners of understanding political power, and even two economic systems. Many of the topics debated during the Reformation and the early Renaissance period are still being debated in our contemporary European society, which is as perplexed and perplexing today as it was in those days.

Islam is the religion that is expected to grow faster in the next forty years even though it is immerse in a profound crisis, which has violence as one of its most notable and worrying problems. In this context we wonder if violence can be considered as part of Islam; to what extent the justification for the use of violence that fundamentalist groups claim can find support in the Koran or if it is possible to reinterpret religious texts and history in a way that allows a peaceful Islam in the twenty-first century. At least as peaceful and positive as most of Muslims’ lives.

Eschatology is concerned with the 'beyond'. Politics, on the other hand, deals with this world, in its public dimension. Politics and eschatology are intimately linked: the former, because without the ultimate goal of a common good present dispensations degenerate into mere bureaucracy ; the latter, since invoking a Heaven that demands no historical transformation 'on Earth' is mere escapism and phoney spirituality.