Dialogues

Within the Cultural Council of the University of Madeira, the ‘Diálogos do Ateneu Project’, hereinafter referred to as ‘Diálogos’, will place particular emphasis on the major issues of today and the multiple paradoxes that they entail and that may jeopardize society, undermining democracy, at the beginning of the millennium.

 

The management of knowledge that, with the evolution of time, changes paradigms of all kinds, reconfiguring them and placing new emphases, according to the selections that are successively undertaken, makes it urgent that the ‘Diálogos’ are (re)started so that we can resume the “memory of the future”, encouraging the emergence of a multiplicity of perspectives, paths and (re)interpretations, the result of questioning, reflection and transversal relationships. Some of these Dialogues will be based on the already vast collection of scientific works existing at the University of Madeira, allowing for the (re)use of “scientific research” as (and also) the essential foundation of Culture.

 

The territory of the ‘Diálogos’ should therefore be one of those privileged places for reunion and recovery of the “society of individuals”, in which the pursuit of a clarified and responsible cultural and social life, is gratified by the certainty of active intervention and participation in democratic life.

On January 22, 2020, alongside the exhibition “Jesuits’ College of Funchal 450 Years”, the “Diálogos” project held, in partnership with the Students Association and the Sacred Art Museum, a lecture on the Sermon of Sixtieth, by Jesuit Father. The Jesuit Father Carlos Azevedo Mendes gave this lecture.

 

Carlos Azevedo Mendes is a law graduate from the University of Lisbon. He worked as a Judicial Magistrate between 1975 and 1980 when he joined the Society of Jesus. He was ordained priest in Lisbon in 1990 and graduated in Theology, with a specialization in spirituality, at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1991. He dedicated his activity to University Pastoral, having collaborated, until 1997, with the University Centre Manuel da Nóbrega, in Coimbra and, since then, with the University Centre Padre António Vieira, in Lisbon.

Coordination

Isabel Portugal