This book explores the philosophical, legal, and theological roots of Western multiculturalism, that is, the encounter and coexistence of different cultures within a liberal society. Rather than concerning themselves with the particulars of cultural dialogue, the authors of this volume go deeper and question the very reality of “multiculturalism” itself.

The contributors represent different cultures and faith traditions but are united in friendship and in the conviction that the Christian faith enables an authentic approach to long-standing debates on multiculturalism.

Contributors: Massimo Borghesi, Francesco Botturi, Marta Cartabia, Carmine Di Martino, Pierpaolo Donati, Costantino Esposito, Stanley Hauerwas, Antonio López, Francisco Javier Martínez Fernández, John Milbank, Javier Prades, David L. Schindler, Angelo Cardinal Scola, Lorenza Violini, Joseph H. H. Weiler.

Starting from both our originary experience of being given to ourselves and Jesus Christ’s archetypal self-donation, Gift and the Unity of Being elucidates the sense in which gift is the form of being’s unity, while unity itself constitutes the permanence of the gift of being. In dialogue with ancient and modern philosophers and theologians, Lopez offers a synthetic, rather than systematic, account of the unity proper to being, the human person, God, and the relations among them. The book shows how contemplation of the triune God of Love through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit allows us to discover the eternal communion that being is and to which finite being is called. It also illustrates the sense in which God’s gratuitousness unexpectedly offers the human person the possibility to recognize and embrace his origin and destiny, and thus he is given to see and taste in God’s light the ever-fruitful, dramatic, and mysterious positivity of being.

The author draws on twenty-five years at the head of a young missionary order which he founded, and proposes a road forward out to the quagmire the Catholic Church and its priests find themselves in today.

«Will there still be priests in the Church’s future? Has not the time come for us to humbly inquire into the direction change should take?». So write Mons. Massimo Camisasca. He dedicates nearly half of his book to silence, prayer, liturgy, and the Mass, and the moves on to discuss several commonly underdeveloped themes (study, fatherhood, common life, and friendship). He closes with tree chapters on hot-button issues (virginity, women, mission) which he treats on the basis of the preceding reflections. With a preface by Mons. Bruguès, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education.

Father Vincent Nagle was born in San Francisco, and raised in a small village in the Redwood forest of Northern California. After finishing his degree in Sociology and Classical Studies at the University of San Francisco, Vincent went to work in Morocco for the Ministry of Education as an English teacher. Vincent then worked for a year in Saudi Arabia before earning a master’s degree in Theology in Berkley, California. His encounter with the movement of Communion and Liberation brought him to enter the seminary of the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo in Rome, Italy in 1987. During his seminary years he earned a degree in Arabic language and religious history at the Pontifical Institute of Islamic Studies. He was ordained a priest in 1992, and shortly thereafter moved back to the United States to work as a hospital chaplain.

Mons. Massimo Camisasca, founder of the Fraternity of St. Charles, has educated priests and seminarians for twenty-five years. The first part of this book contains several lessons given to his seminarians during their formation. The second part is articulated around five words: the three “classic” terms (poverty, virginity and obedience) are completed with reflections on fatherhood and fruitfulness.