1.
Sant'Egidio, Rome
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SantEgidio is a convent church in Trastevere, Rome. SantEgidio is the saint of hermits. The church was founded in 1630 and was abandoned by the nuns in 1971, in 1973, it was occupied by the Community of SantEgidio, which had been founded in 1968, and was still looking for a meeting place of its own. The community, which had not had a name before, then chose to name itself after its church, together with the adjacent former Carmelite monastery, the church forms the seat of the Community of SantEgidio. Pierre Anouilh, Des pauvres a la paix, aspects de laction pacificatrice de SantEgidio au Mozambique, _LFM. Sciences sociales et mmissions_, No.17, Dec.2005, pp. 11–40 Eric Morier-Genoud, interviews de Don Matteo Zuppi & Ricardo Cannelli, _LFM. Sciences sociales et mmissions_, Oct 2003, pp. 119–145 The Community of SantEgidio homepage DREAM programm - The Community of SantEgidio NO to the Death Penalty - The Community of SantEgidio
2.
Prayer
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Prayer is an invocation or act that seeks to activate a rapport with an object of worship through deliberate communication. Prayer can be a form of practice, may be either individual or communal. It may involve the use of words, song or complete silence, when language is used, prayer may take the form of a hymn, incantation, formal creedal statement, or a spontaneous utterance in the praying person. There are different forms of such as petitionary prayer, prayers of supplication, thanksgiving. Thus, people pray for many such as personal benefit, asking for divine grace, spiritual connection. Some anthropologists believe that the earliest intelligent modern humans practiced a form of prayer, scientific studies regarding the use of prayer have mostly concentrated on its effect on the healing of sick or injured people. Meta-studies of the studies in this field have been performed showing evidence only for no effect or a small effect. Some studies have indicated increased medical complications in groups receiving prayer over those without, the efficacy of petition in prayer for physical healing to a deity has been evaluated in numerous other studies, with contradictory results. There has been criticism of the way the studies were conducted. The act of prayer is attested in sources as early as 5000 years ago. Some anthropologists, such as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and Sir James George Frazer, various spiritual traditions offer a wide variety of devotional acts. There are morning and evening prayers, graces said over meals, some Christians bow their heads and fold their hands. Some Native Americans regard dancing as a form of prayer, Jewish prayer may involve swaying back and forth and bowing. Muslims practice salat in their prayers, some pray according to standardized rituals and liturgies, while others prefer extemporaneous prayers. Friedrich Heiler is often cited in Christian circles for his systematic Typology of Prayer which lists six types of prayer, primitive, ritual, Greek cultural, philosophical, mystical, some forms of prayer require a prior ritualistic form of cleansing or purification such as in ghusl and wudhu. Prayer may be privately and individually, or it may be done corporately in the presence of fellow believers. Prayer can be incorporated into a daily life, in which one is in constant communication with a god. Some people pray throughout all that is happening during the day and this is actually regarded as a requirement in several Christian denominations, although enforcement is not possible nor desirable
3.
Bible
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The Bible is a collection of sacred texts or scriptures that Jews and Christians consider to be a product of divine inspiration and a record of the relationship between God and humans. Many different authors contributed to the Bible, what is regarded as canonical text differs depending on traditions and groups, a number of Bible canons have evolved, with overlapping and diverging contents. The Christian Old Testament overlaps with the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Septuagint, the New Testament is a collection of writings by early Christians, believed to be mostly Jewish disciples of Christ, written in first-century Koine Greek. These early Christian Greek writings consist of narratives, letters, among Christian denominations there is some disagreement about the contents of the canon, primarily the Apocrypha, a list of works that are regarded with varying levels of respect. Attitudes towards the Bible also differ amongst Christian groups and this concept arose during the Protestant Reformation, and many denominations today support the use of the Bible as the only source of Christian teaching. With estimated total sales of over 5 billion copies, the Bible is widely considered to be the book of all time. It has estimated sales of 100 million copies, and has been a major influence on literature and history, especially in the West. The English word Bible is from the Latin biblia, from the word in Medieval Latin and Late Latin. Medieval Latin biblia is short for biblia sacra holy book, while biblia in Greek and it gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as a singular into the vernaculars of Western Europe. Latin biblia sacra holy books translates Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια ta biblia ta hagia, the word βιβλίον itself had the literal meaning of paper or scroll and came to be used as the ordinary word for book. It is the diminutive of βύβλος byblos, Egyptian papyrus, possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician sea port Byblos from whence Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece, the Greek ta biblia was an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books. Christian use of the term can be traced to c.223 CE, bruce notes that Chrysostom appears to be the first writer to use the Greek phrase ta biblia to describe both the Old and New Testaments together. The division of the Hebrew Bible into verses is based on the sof passuk cantillation mark used by the 10th-century Masoretes to record the verse divisions used in oral traditions. The oldest extant copy of a complete Bible is an early 4th-century parchment book preserved in the Vatican Library, the oldest copy of the Tanakh in Hebrew and Aramaic dates from the 10th century CE. The oldest copy of a complete Latin Bible is the Codex Amiatinus and he states that it is not a magical book, nor was it literally written by God and passed to mankind. In Christian Bibles, the New Testament Gospels were derived from traditions in the second half of the first century CE. Riches says that, Scholars have attempted to reconstruct something of the history of the oral traditions behind the Gospels, the period of transmission is short, less than 40 years passed between the death of Jesus and the writing of Marks Gospel. This means that there was time for oral traditions to assume fixed form
4.
Gospel
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A gospel is an account describing the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity places a value on the four canonical gospels, which it considers to be revelations from God. This position however, requires a view of Biblical inerrancy. The word gospel derives from the Old English gōd-spell, meaning good news or glad tidings, the gospel was considered the good news of the coming Kingdom of Messiah, and of redemption through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, the central Christian message. The Greek word euangelion is also the source of the terms evangelist, the authors of the four canonical Christian gospels are known as the Four Evangelists. Paul the Apostle used the term εὐαγγέλιον when he reminded the people of the church at Corinth of the gospel I preached to you, the earliest extant use of gospel to denote a particular genre of literature dates to the 2nd century. Justin Martyr in the Apology wrote of. the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, more generally, gospels compose a genre of early Christian writings. Gospels that did not become canonical also circulated in Early Christianity, many, such as the work known today as Gospel of Thomas, lack the narrative framework typical of a gospel. Scholars hold a wide spectrum of views on the origins and composition of the gospels, for example, the vast majority of material in Mark is also present in either Luke or Matthew or both, suggesting that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke. He writes that the four gospels were probably all written by the end of the first century. But they did not yet at that time have a consistent narrative, in 170 Tatian sought to find a solution by composing a single narrative out of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, with some additional oral material. Richies concludes that the gospel passages themselves can be unclear, and some of the messages within are straightforwardly ambiguous, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are considered synoptic gospels on the basis of many similarities between them that are not shared by the Gospel of John. Synoptic means here that they can be seen or read together, the fourth gospel, the Gospel of John, presents a very different picture of Jesus and his ministry from the synoptics. Of the many gospels written in antiquity, only four came to be accepted as part of the New Testament. An insistence upon there being a canon of four gospels, and no others, was a theme of Irenaeus of Lyons. Irenaeus was ultimately successful in declaring that the four gospels collectively and he also supported reading each gospel in light of the others. This canon, which corresponds to the modern Catholic canon, was used in the Vulgate, Gospel of Matthew Gospel of John Gospel of Luke Gospel of Mark This order is found in the following manuscripts, Bezae, Monacensis, Washingtonianus, Tischendorfianus IV, Uncial 0234. Although there is no set order of the four gospels in patristic lists or discussions, moody Smith suggests that the standard order of Matthew-Mark-Luke-John projects a kind of intention that can scarcely be ignored
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Poverty
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Poverty is general scarcity or the state of one who lacks a certain amount of material possessions or money. It is a concept, which includes social, economic. Absolute poverty or destitution refers to the lack of necessary to meet basic needs such as food, clothing. Absolute poverty is meant to be about the independent of location. After the industrial revolution, mass production in factories made producing goods increasingly less expensive, of more importance is the modernization of agriculture, such as fertilizers, to provide enough yield to feed the population. Strategies of increasing income to make basic needs more affordable typically include welfare, economic freedoms, Poverty reduction is a major goal and issue for many international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. The World Bank forecasts that 702.1 million people, down from 1.75 billion in 1990, of these, about 347.1 million people lived in Sub-Saharan Africa and 231.3 million lived in South Asia. According to the World Bank, between 1990 and 2015, the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty fell from 37. 1% to 9. 6%. Nevertheless, given the current economic model, built on GDP, extreme poverty is a global challenge, it is observed in all parts of the world, including developed economies. UNICEF estimates half the children live in poverty. It has been argued by some academics that the policies promoted by global financial institutions such as the IMF. Another estimate places the true scale of poverty much higher than the World Bank, with an estimated 4.3 billion people living with less than $5 a day and unable to meet basic needs adequately. In 2012 it is estimated that, given a poverty line of $1.25 a day 1.2 billion people lived in poverty, the word poverty comes from old French poverté, from Latin paupertās from pauper. The English word poverty via Anglo-Norman povert, there are several definitions of poverty depending on the context of the situation it is placed in, and the views of the person giving the definition. Income Poverty, a familys income fails to meet a federally established threshold that differs across countries, United Nations, Fundamentally, poverty is the inability of having choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of capacity to participate effectively in society. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and it means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living in marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation. World Bank, Poverty is pronounced deprivation in well-being, and comprises many dimensions and it includes low incomes and the inability to acquire the basic goods and services necessary for survival with dignity
6.
Ecumenism
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Ecumenism refers to efforts by Christians of different church traditions to develop closer relationships and better understandings. The term is often used to refer to efforts towards the visible. The terms ecumenism and ecumenical come from the Greek οἰκουμένη, which means the inhabited world. The ecumenical vision comprises both the search for the unity of the Church and the whole inhabited earth as the concern of all Christians. Used in this sense, the term carries no connotation of re-uniting the historically separated Christian denominations. Historically, the word was used in the context of large ecumenical councils that were organized under the auspices of Roman Emperors to clarify matters of Christian theology. These Ecumenical Councils brought together bishops from around the world as they knew it at the time. There were a total of seven ecumenical councils accepted by both Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism held before the Great Schism, thus, the modern meaning of the world ecumenical and ecumenism derives from this pre-modern sense of Christian unity, and the impulse to recreate this unity again. Ecumenism and nondenominational or postdenominational movements are not necessarily the same thing, while some of these can be ecumenical in intent, normally nondenominationalism seeks no common organizing principle nor works toward the unity of Christians. If ecumenism is the quest for Christian unity, it must be understood what the divisions are which must be overcome, Christianity is the largest religion in the world and the various divisions have commonalities and differences in tradition, theology, church government, doctrine, and language. The exact number of denominations is disputed, based on differing definitions used. The largest number often quoted is approximately 45,000 from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, the World Christian Encyclopedia lists approximately 33,000 in 2001. Yet, at the time, the World Council of Churches counts only 348 member churches. This, with the Catholic Churchs 1.25 billion Christians indicates that 349 churches/denominations already account for nearly 80% of the worlds Christian population, One problem with the larger numbers is that single denominations can be counted multiple times. For example, the Catholic Church is a church, or communion. Further, the Catholic Church presence in each country is counted as a different denomination - though this is in no way an ecclesiologically accurate definition and this can result in the one Catholic Church being counted as 242 distinct denominations, as in the World Christian Encyclopedia. Other denominations may be very small remnants of once larger churches, the United Society of Believers in Christs Second Appearing have only three full members, for example, yet are a distinct denomination. Most current divisions are the result of historical schisms - a break in the communion between previously united Churches, bishops, or communities
7.
Interfaith dialogue
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Similarly, pluralistic rationalist groups have hosted public reasoning dialogues to transcend all worldviews, termed transbelief dialogue. Throughout the world there are local, regional, national and international initiatives, many are formally or informally linked. The often quoted There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions, There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue among the religions was formulated by Dr Hans Küng, a Professor of Ecumenical Theology and President of the Global Ethic Foundation. To some, the interreligious dialogue has the same meaning as interfaith dialogue. Neither are the same as Nondenominational Christianity, the World Council of Churches, though. To the WCC, interreligious refers to action between different Christian denominations, so, interfaith refers to interaction between different faith groups such as Muslim and Christian or Jew for example. In the dialogue of the hands, we all work together to make the world a place in which we must all live together. In the dialogue of the heart, we share the experience of the emotions of different from us. The historical effectiveness of interfaith dialogue is an issue of debate, friar James L. Heft, in a lecture on The Necessity of Inter-Faith Diplomacy, spoke about the conflicts among practitioners of the three Abrahamic religions. The sad reality has been that most of the time Jews, Muslims and Christians have remained ignorant about each other, or worse, especially in the case of Christians and Muslims, attacked each other. In contrast, The Pluralism Project at Harvard University says, Every religious tradition has grown through the ages in dialogue, Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been part of one anothers histories, have shared not only villages and cities, but ideas of God and divine revelation. The importance of Abrahamic interfaith dialogue in the present has been presented, We human beings today face a stark choice. Religious pluralism can also be observed in historical contexts, including Muslim Spain. Zarmanochegas was a monk of the Sramana tradition from India who journeyed to Antioch, disputation of Barcelona - religious disputation between Jews and Christians in 1263. The apostate Paulus Christiani proposed to King James I of Aragon that a public religious disputation on the fundamentals of faith should be held between him and R. Moses b. Nahman whom he had encountered in Gerona. The Dominicans Raymond de Peñaforte, Raymond Martini, and Arnold de Segarra, the single representative for the Jewish side was Naḥmanides. The four sessions of the disputation took place on July 20,27,30, Naḥmanides was guaranteed complete freedom of speech in the debate, he took full advantage of the opportunity thus afforded and spoke with remarkable frankness
8.
Andrea Riccardi
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Andrea Riccardi is an Italian historian, professor, politician and activist, founder of the Community of SantEgidio. Since November 16,2011, he has served as Minister for International Cooperation without portfolio in the Monti Cabinet, in 1999, he received the Houphouet-Boigny Peace Prize from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. In November 2004, he was given the International Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace and he has also taught at Sapienza University and the University of Bari. Andrea Riccardi is also a member of the Fondation Chiracs honour committee and he also participated as jury member in 2009 for the Prize for Conflict Prevention awarded every year by this foundation. From 4 January 2013 to 16 May 2013 Riccardi was the President of Civic Choice, a centrist political party
9.
Rome
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Rome is a special comune and the capital of Italy. Rome also serves as the capital of the Lazio region, with 2,873,598 residents in 1,285 km2, it is also the countrys largest and most populated comune and fourth-most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. It is the center of the Metropolitan City of Rome, which has a population of 4.3 million residents, the city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio, along the shores of the Tiber. Romes history spans more than 2,500 years, while Roman mythology dates the founding of Rome at only around 753 BC, the site has been inhabited for much longer, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in Europe. The citys early population originated from a mix of Latins, Etruscans and it was first called The Eternal City by the Roman poet Tibullus in the 1st century BC, and the expression was also taken up by Ovid, Virgil, and Livy. Rome is also called the Caput Mundi, due to that, Rome became first one of the major centres of the Italian Renaissance, and then the birthplace of both the Baroque style and Neoclassicism. Famous artists, painters, sculptors and architects made Rome the centre of their activity, in 1871 Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, and in 1946 that of the Italian Republic. Rome has the status of a global city, Rome ranked in 2014 as the 14th-most-visited city in the world, 3rd most visited in the European Union, and the most popular tourist attraction in Italy. Its historic centre is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, monuments and museums such as the Vatican Museums and the Colosseum are among the worlds most visited tourist destinations with both locations receiving millions of tourists a year. Rome hosted the 1960 Summer Olympics and is the seat of United Nations Food, however, it is a possibility that the name Romulus was actually derived from Rome itself. As early as the 4th century, there have been alternate theories proposed on the origin of the name Roma. There is archaeological evidence of occupation of the Rome area from approximately 14,000 years ago. Evidence of stone tools, pottery and stone weapons attest to about 10,000 years of human presence, several excavations support the view that Rome grew from pastoral settlements on the Palatine Hill built above the area of the future Roman Forum. Between the end of the age and the beginning of the Iron age. However, none of them had yet an urban quality, nowadays, there is a wide consensus that the city was gradually born through the aggregation of several villages around the largest one, placed above the Palatine. All these happenings, which according to the excavations took place more or less around the mid of the 8th century BC. Despite recent excavations at the Palatine hill, the view that Rome has been indeed founded with an act of will as the legend suggests in the middle of the 8th century BC remains a fringe hypothesis. Traditional stories handed down by the ancient Romans themselves explain the earliest history of their city in terms of legend and myth
