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IDENTITYExploring our
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MEETINGS AT
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Face to face with...
A place where roads meet. A time of change.
"When I see the
heavens, the work of
Your hands,
the moon and the
stars which You
arranged,
what is man that You
should keep him in
mind,
mortal man that You
care for him?

Yet You have made
him little less that a
god,
with glory and
honour You crowned
him,
gave him power over
the works of Your
hand,
put all things under
his feet"

Bible, Psalm 8

Face to Face with...
Antonio Monda





A Dialogue between Journalist and
Film Director Antonio MONDA
author of Do You Believe?
Conversations on God and Religion

and

Paolo VALESIO
Department of Italian
Columbia University

Wednesday, November 19
at 7:00 PM
Italian Academy at
Columbia University
1161 Amsterdam Ave. (bet. 116th
&118th Street)

TRANSCRIPT - PHOTO GALLERY

DOWNLOAD THE INVITATION


The conference is open to the public and
free of charge.
The idea of the “Face to face...”
series is to create an occasion for
our audience to meet not some
interesting ideas but rather an
interesting person, somebody
whose work and experience can
teach us something. “An interesting
person” is certainly a good way to
describe our guest, Mr. Antonio
Monda.   
He was famously described by the
New York Times as "the most well-
connected cultural figure you've
never heard of," which of course is
no longer accurate since many of
us have heard of him at least
because of his remarkable book of
interviews, “Do you believe?” We
would like to mention only one
aspect of Mr. Monda's work that we
find striking. It is the way in which he
understands that, deep down,
culture is always about the human
person. Whereas many people
today tend to reduce man
ideologically (say, to biological,
sociological or psychological
factors), Mr. Monda is aware that
there is something irreducible about
a human person, about its
questions and needs. This is
especially clear when discussing
religion. Nowadays religion is a hot
topic, but it is almost always
discussed as a function of
something else: religion as a
political motivator, religion as a
source of morality, religion as a
cultural identifier and so on. It is
rare to find somebody who realizes
that religion is first of all about what
it means to be human, so that it is
just impossible to be human and not
to be religious. Except that our
culture seems completely
unequipped to deal with the
religious questions and tends to
emarginate the more existentially
serious voices. In a sense, an
important question we would like to
ask Antonio Monda is: how is it
possible to live in the midst of
contemporary culture, as he does,
without having to bury away or
forget our deeper human
questions? If so, what is his
experience of these questions? And
what role do they play in his work?
Reopening these questions seems
to us the most important
contribution that a Christian can
make to today's culture.
Crossroads Cultural Center
and
Columbia Catholic Ministry
In collaboration with the Italian Department at Columbia