Seeing beyond in Seeing beyond in facing death. Spirituality from sick body to salvation – Contents, care and relationships in different cultures

part of the initiatives related to the Master Death Studies & The end of life of the University of Padua and it is the fourth of other similar events. The interdisciplinary reflection, that characterizes the master and the related conferences, concerns every kind of loss and outlines a horizon in which it is defined how to become aware of the anguish of death and how to cope with it. In 2009, the first conference focused on the issue Dying between reason and faith and developed the discussion on the types of consolation in order to distinguish them from illusions, redefining the boundaries between the certainty wanted by faith, the probability wanted by science and the indubitability indicated by the truth. In that occasion the philosopher Emanuele Severino and Cardinal Angelo Scola were asked to debate on eternity and salvation, but also on the fundamental error of Western reason. In this fourth conference, we invited, five years later, the same philosopher to start the discussion and to hear, once again, his talk on his most important theme: the impossibility of annihilation and, therefore, the madness of representing death as we conceive and as we have always conceived it, at all latitudes and in each culture. According to this perspective the reflection on death actually becomes a field for an essential reformulation of matters concerning death itself. To the extent that we share the idea that society is built on death, a profound reappraisal of all the categories used to organize human relations is required. So if human beings suffer because of what they believe to be and if believing to be mortal is the main belief that characterizes their consciousness, then discuss the representation of these same beliefs is certainly a valuable chance of innovation and the conference ”Seeing beyond” gives us this chance in an unusual and significant way . Actually, a systematic and true debate between different languages on this theme has not been tried yet, and even less it has been tried starting from a radical suggestion that requires the definition of the basic structures of thought and of their expression in all cultures. Therefore, during the conference we will present a dialogue between different apparently irreconcilable positions in order to understand how to refer to a universal but diversified symbolic horizon, able to decline with different languages the sense of ulteriority. The aim is to look toward the past and the elsewhere in order to resume a path that this time of global crisis seems to have interrupted. So important names of the Catholic faith such as Monsignor Sorondo, monk Guidalberto Bormolini and Don Andrea Toniolo, dean of the Theological Faculty of Triveneto to whom we assigned the postface of this volume, are asked to testify the sense of this plurivocal universe. The Jewish culture will also participate with the contributions of Roberto Della Rocca and of Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, while the Muslim culture will be represented by the Iman of Rome Abdallah Redwan and it will be discussed in its contents by Vincenzo Pace expert on Muslim religiosity. The sense of oriental meditation will be testified by Raffaello Longo e Franco Battiato who will be present not only with his speech but also with his documentary ”Attraversando il Bardo”, in which Buddhist monks and Christians face one another, dialoguing with Manlio Sgalambro. In this occasion, once again between reason and faith, the philosophers will face one another on reductionism, eternality and counseling practices. So Vincenzo Vitiello, Luigi Tarca e Alessandro Peterlini, in different spaces, will talk about their way of relating with the great thinkers of the history and with Emanuele Severino about the belief of being mortal. Important, as well, is the valuable participation of international speakers, leading figures in this field of studies, among which Douglas J. Davies, Thomas A. Cavanaugh and Albert Parsaud. In this agora, the major religions of the world will meet each other along with medicine and psychology, sociology and anthropology, welcoming the experience of those working with dying persons and with the mourners who support them, trying together to provide a space for reflection in order to give back a meaning to this suffering. Thanks to the strength of this background, in addition to the important areas of palliation and of medical humanities, who have now internationally gained an increasingly wide consensus, the conference introduces in Italy a further innovative field of application, death education, which I have been personally experiencing in various schools in the last ten years. Seeing Beyond, therefore, meets the need to reopen the dialogue between philosophy, science and religion, in the light of what we care the most for and of what lights us up: the thought that sees beyond the obstacles that are on his way.