Integral Human Development in the Portuguese context. A post-doctoral fellowship program

This post-doc program aims at the renewal of Catholic thought by potentializing its role to intervene and open room for dialogue within Portugal’s political and social realms and at addressing the multiple issues related to Portugal’s social inequality, including poverty, social exclusion, gender inequality and discrimination, immigration, drug consumption, domestic violence, and racism. By offering an opportunity of values-based research in an interdisciplinary environment, in which individual excellence meets the dynamics of teamwork, the fellowship scheme will function as a highly transformative mechanism. The leading vision of and the main causes promoted by the Dicastery for IHD find an anchorage in Portugal through this pioneering Fellowship scheme which contributes to reach a critical mass of post-docs trained accordingly for the transformation of Church and Society in this country. Fellows become IHD-fluent speaking and thoughtful leaders in their spiritual, social and cognitive dimensions. It contributes to women empowerment by an over-proportional promotion of female fellows enabled to take part in the academic discourse and system, IHD networks and media. It will establish effective multidisciplinary collaborations and values-based, interdisciplinary research, enriching research frameworks and insights around the multiple dimensions that underpin IHD. The academic research results and public outputs of the fellows’ initiatives offer a concrete translation of IHD principles in the Portuguese context leading to transformative practices. The fellowship program is in line with the innovative aims of Católica Doctoral School (CADOS), an interdisciplinary hub for doctoral training and research. The fellowship scheme will address post-doctoral training in an unprecedented way by offering conditions and a values-based framework fusing Academia, Church and Society in a common mission. Such a programmatic and distinctive initiative is unique and an entirely new approach in Portuguese Academia. CADOS and Porticus are best fitting partners for being dedicated to fostering and professionalizing likeminded Catholic leaders of the future, giving thereby institutional support for the kind of scientific, socio-political, cultural, and civic intervention this scheme entails. By covering the
gap that currently prevents people’s integral development, Porticus will help CADOS promote networks of future leaders by engaging them with critical global challenges in the face of an uncertain world.