During the last academic year 2006-2007, I had the opportunity to attend two professional conferences abroad.  It is always a pleasure to travel and learn, and especially to meet people from other countries who either work in the same or in a similar field  and with whom there is an intellectual affinity because of common values and ideals.

In September of 2006 I traveled to Pamplona, Spain, where an interdisciplinary colloquium had been organized at the University of Navarra on the topic of “Christian Identity: Christian Values and Civil Society.”  This colloquium had been preceded in the spring of 2006 by a conference on natural law and would be followed a year later in the fall of 2007 by another conference on cultures and rationality.  The impetus for all three conferences came from a letter which the Rector of the University of Navarra received toward the end of 2004 from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, signed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation.  The objective of the letter was to seek the University’s collaboration in the study of an important topic: the search in our contemporary world for a common denominator of moral principles, shared by all peoples, and based on the very constitution of the human person and of society, which could serve as basic criteria for legislating on the fundamental problems which affect the rights and obligations of all persons.  The University of Navarra welcomed the challenge of this objective, which is very much in keeping with its own foundational interests.

The colloquium I attended had about one hundred academics in attendance, of whom only thirty or less presented short papers of no more than fifteen minutes.  The reason for the brevity of the papers was to leave sufficient time for discussion.  My own presentation, entitled “The Confrontation between Love and the Incapacity to Love,” a phrase taken from Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, to describe the struggle which characterizes world history today, had two goals: first, to consider some of the general and specific reasons for the inability to love, so contrary to a truly human and Christian life; and second, to propose some ways which can serve to awaken the memory of our moral and religious sense, and with this our personal and Christian identity.  In “a civilization of the image” such as ours, it seems to me that we need to consider how great works of art and literature, as well as the stories of those who have undergone profound conversions, can touch people’s hearts and bring about a personal encounter with truth.

Given the second part of my presentation, I found it particularly interesting that one of the participants, a Polish film director by the name of Kryzstof Zanussi, should have remarked that European films in the last thirty years have lost in great part a narrative conception of human life, that Christians according to him no longer care about art, and that art has lost the sense of true mystery, preferring instead what he called the “token mystery” of horror stories.  I think his point about the loss of a narrative conception of human life is well put, and this was an interesting point for discussion since the fragmentation of human life seems to be more prevalent today than unity of life and than the teleological dimension of human life whereby each human act would be considered in terms of bringing us closer to our final end or distancing us from it and thus bringing the story of our lives to completion or to frustration, that is, to the happy ending or the tragic ending.

This is just one example of the very rich and profound, albeit brief, presentations at the colloquium of the University of Navarra.  While three or four academics presented in each session of an approximate duration of an hour, the question and answer sessions lasted for an hour and a half or more.  This gave ample opportunity for a rich discussion of the papers.  The colloquium which lasted two full days ended with a morning session on the third day which attempted to synthesize the main ideas presented and to propose lines of research for further study.  By means of this session it was evident that this colloquium was intended to foster additional research on a topic dear to all the attendees, that is, the promotion of personal and Christian identity in society today.

Like the colloquium in Spain, the conference I attended in Rome at the end of March of 2007 at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross also incorporated into the schedule very extended question and answer sessions.  It too was interdisciplinary and international.  The conference was organized by the Faculties of Philosophy and Communication, and was the third meeting of a permanent seminar entitled “Poetics and Christianity.”  The topic of the conference was: “Mimesis, Truth, Fiction: Rethinking Art. On the path of the Poetics of Aristotle.”  The structure of this conference was rather different from the one at Navarra, since in addition to short papers which were presented in concurrent sessions in the afternoons of this two-day conference, there were plenary sessions during which each presentation lasted forty-five minutes.   My paper at the Rome conference was a forty-five minute presentation entitled: “Art, Truth, and Morality: Aesthetic Self-forgetfulness vs. Recognition.”  The paper aims at presenting “three rival versions of aesthetic enquiry”: the Ancients’ concern for the arts in the light of truth and moral education; modern aesthetics and its initial separation from truth and morality; and later “aesthetic separatism” as seen in “art for art’s sake,” and more particularly in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.  My contention is that this book leads us to see that the arts are far from being morally neutral and indifferent to truth and that the philosophies of art and beauty of Plato and Aristotle contain a wisdom superior to their modern and contemporary counterparts, a wisdom which I believe needs to be recovered.

The late afternoon question and answer sessions of this particular conference were especially thought-provoking.  Some of the questions which were posed dealt with different types of beauty, sensible beauty vs. spiritual beauty, the particular beauty of suffering and the cross, the type of truth found in art, etc. —all excellent questions from persons genuinely interested in the topic of the conference and in what the plenary session speakers had to say.  I was impressed with the quality of the participants, students and professors alike.

My impression of conferences abroad is that for the participants a conference means much more than just another entry into one’s cv: they seem to value quality over quantity.   People abroad seem very committed to their field of study and perhaps that is why the time for discussion is quite extended. They want to ponder over what was said, they want to speak and listen, they seem to take the quest for truth very seriously, at least that was so in the conferences I attended.  I came back from Rome, as I did from Spain, invigorated by the exchange of ideas and by the people I had met.

Alice Ramos, PhD, is a Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University, Queens, NY.