Topic of the Seminar:
Seeing, Understanding and Acting
Processes in Care, Counselling and Interreligious Communication
A week of intercultural and interreligious encounters on pastoral care and counselling will focus on the central theme of „Seeing, Understanding, and Acting.”
Drawing on Lublin’s association with “The Seer” Horowitz, we will reflect on two important meanings of „to see” in the context of interreligious dialogue and care. First, there is „the seer”: a person who possesses profound moral and spiritual insight or knowledge, a wise person or a sage who possesses intuitive powers. Seers can be found in the history of every religion. From that, we arrive at a second meaning of our central theme: To see and understand one another but also to see, recognize, and understand each other in his/her otherness.
We will use the theme of the seminar to explore both meanings, specifically as the basis for interpersonal communication and for intercultural dialogue. We will investigate how communication is a process of translation of meaning. Communication is (inter)action that requires mutual engagement of all participants in joint action. This has significant implications for education, as well as in pastoral care.
To ensure successful interfaith contact, it is important that we first look closely, observe carefully, acknowledge the other’s otherness and try to fully understand them without judging, while also engaging in an exchange. To fully understand the other not only includes empathy on a psychological or emotional level, but it also means trying to reach a certain level of existential empathy. Existential empathy involves seeing, understanding, and empathizing the meaning and purpose of someone’s existence, including core realities such as faith, belief, freedom, responsibility, death, and loneliness. In pastoral care and counseling, this level of empathy, this level of seeing the other is crucial. We will also explore what pastoral care and counseling means in the context of war.
To explore this year’s theme, we will use lectures, workshops, reflection groups, and informal exchanges, as well as a visit to the city of Lublin.