Burn the Ships and Gamble the Remains: A Call for Utopia and Hope

Carlos Gomez Restrepo, FSC

ABSTRACT

The current reality of the world challenges the Lasallian educational mission and generates new contexts in which we must rethink the founding values of our tradition, as well as the urgency to review our educational proposals. Education is undoubtedly a fundamental pillar for humanization and for the construction of inclusive and just societies. These are times to take positions in response to current demands, which, in turn, urge us to be clear about the essentials of our mission: the development of critical thinking, the commitment to humanism, the school that is renewed and responds to actual contexts, and the care for quality, especially in the educational service of the poor.

The new horizons we see are called into permanent dialogues with a plural and diverse world, to think about the prophetic voice of our educational institutions, especially the Lasallian university, and to be aware, as participants, of the emerging realities to which to respond through education. Thus, the Lasallian mission is a vital sign that seeks to recapture our utopian vocation, which answers the present and inspires the future, which congregates in hope, and which gambles/risks for a better world.

Full Text: Burn the Ships and Gamble the Remains A Call for Utopia and Hope

Keywords: new contexts, emerging realities, founding values, Lasallian education, quality for all, faith, fraternity, ardent zeal, synodal Church, humanistic and humanizing, pluralistic society, secular world, new horizons, hope