Common home and new ways of living interculturally: Public theology and ecology of culture in pandemic times

[Associated axes: RR1/RR2, SWL and PT]: The aim of the project is to analyse, critically discern and qualify the practices of ecological conversion by deepening the notion of the Common Home in the encyclical Laudato si' and by creating theoretical tools for literacy, reflection and application of the ecological objectives in their various levels of correlation between the religious agenda and the 2030 Agenda, through the production of a public theology, in an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and intercultural way. Common Home is a shared concept between the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Encyclical Letter Laudato si´, published months earlier. The new scenario of COVID19 and humanitarian crisis demands even more the adoption of a public agenda for a collective political and social effort that overcomes the cultural contradictions of economic determinism and calls for shared responsibility, supported by a culture of solidarity. In the words of Pope Francis, this moment reveals a humanity thinking that it would be possible to always be healthy in a world that is sick. At times like these, religions have a great potential for empathy and social cooperation with public agendas. In this way, the project is to offer public theological hermeneutics that incorporates the 2030 Agenda into religious culture, based on the notion of care for Common Home. As specific objectives it aims to offer a theoretical toolbox to: a) develop an epistemological model that interacts with the potential for cooperation and solidarity in the religious field with the diverse areas of knowledge, in an intercultural key that seeks cooperative solutions between different people and institutions for common problems; b) promoting an ecological cultural creation for the interdependent SDGs that focus on languages that bring together critical and common sense; c) fostering everyday practices, which brings about the need to think of vulnerability as a central category of an ethics and aesthetics of care, since the intersection of religious agendas with the 2030 Agenda. The project involves 20 areas of knowledge from 15 countries in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, bringing together more than 100 researchers organised into 10 working groups, namely: 1) Epistemologies of the Common Home; 2) Systematic Theology of the Common Home; 3) Theopoetics, Aesthetics and Performativity of the Common Home; 4) Biblical Wisdom and the Common Home; 5) Digital Ecology; 6) Spirituality and Health of the Common Home; 7) Ecofeminism and Ecoculture; 8) Practices of Ecological Conversion; 9) Ecopolitics of the Common Home; 10) Human Rights: Fundamental Ecoemergence. The project envisages its outputs at three levels of literacy: 1) Specialised level through the publication of national and international scientific articles in high-impact journals; 2) Intermediate level with the bilingual Portuguese and English collection "Caring for our Common Home", with 10 volumes published by UCP Press and Globethics, the academic arm of the ecumenical body, the World Council of Churches; 3) Introductory level with the creation of the Digital Lexicon of the Common Home, which assumes that the ideal reader is the first-year university student. The choice of publishing partners takes into account the open access policy. The project is scheduled to end in 2025 with the final publication of the collection and will evolve into the creation of a cluster on Common Home issues at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. The project is co-financed by FCT by funding the principal investigator coordinating the project through the Scientific Employment Stimulus programme, CITER - Research Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, CECC - Research Centre for Communication and Culture both belong to the the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP), the Global Educational Pact Bureau of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR), Brazil, and Globethics, Switzerland.

Common Home, Laudato si´, Public Theology