Fides – I: cultivating the transcendental dimension

Abstract

This study deals with the challenge of proposing a very alive and steady presence of fides in Jesuit universities. On one hand, it respects at all times and even motivates the very essence of the university while, on the other, it welcomes lucidly and with empathy the real pluralism involved in the religious aspect. After an introduction about the world of emotions involved in experiences of faith in the university context, it goes on to define what is to be understood by “faith” in its widest sense, emphasizing at all times its delicate relationship with what is decisive in universities, rational knowledge. Thus clarifying what fides entails, the next section analyses the question of the legitimacy of its presence in the university: it will depend decisively on its consideration as a faith that is not dogmatized, and corresponds to university knowledge in a non limiting way. Based on these premises, many means are presented for university approaches to religious issues, which lead to the need to offer these in diverse ways depending on individual cases (as something obligatory, or as an academic demand, or as an option.). In the following section, and more precisely, a model with the presence of fides is proposed for the Jesuit universities in our context, defining it as an inspirational Christian denomination and invitation within the framework of an acceptance of pluralism; then comes the proposal of the “asymmetrical relationship “ between fides as well as other dimensions of the Ledesma–Kolvenbach model. Thus the stage is set for a last step leading to a concrete programming dealing with the presence of faith in Jesuit universities, keeping in mind the different environments involved (teaching, research, extracurricular, social projection) as well as different modalities of this presence depending as much on the life styles of the persons involved as on the demands and possibilities of the sphere in question.