For sixteen straight years now, the Augustinian Federation of Spain (FAE) has been organizing annually a formation seminar for the educators of the Augustinian Family. Participants are religous and lay educators of the schools of the Augustinians, Augustinian Recollects, Augustinian Missionary Sisters, Augustinian Recollect Missionary Sisters, and Augustinian Sisters of Refuge. There are some 50 educational institutions run by these congregations in Spain, with hundreds of educators and many thousands of students who receive the Augustinian mark of education.
Opening
It was the Augustinian Fr. Julián Muñoz who, representing the Augustinian Missionary Sister María Jesús Rodríguez, opened the seminar with a beautiful speech that touched the hearts of the participants and clearly defined the goal of the seminar and the direction Augustinian schools have to take if they are to be evangelizing and to respond to the needs of today’s culture. “It would be good”, Julián Muñoz capped his speech, “if Seminar 2009 would produce a longing in all the participants and a wake of questions about the gift of faith and the person’s image of God”. The Augustinian Seminar on Education 2009 was organized to try to respond to the questions and concerns of evangelization in Augustinian schools and to offer a venue for reflection.
The first lecture was given by Juan de Dios Martín Velasco, who treated the topic “God in the universe of religions”. An expert on the phenomenology of religion, he masterfully argued how a religion cannot be understood without reference to a “God”, Supreme and Absolute Being who is above all and who manifests himself as the totally “Other”.
Javier Cortés Soriano gave the second lecture, which was titled: “Religion and culture. To speak of God today”. The lecturer, who is familiar with school life, focused on how to speak of God today in the school. He insisted that our schools must become institutions committed to the most authentic religious values from the harmony and complementariness of their three educative environments: the academic, the pastoral and the extracurricular.
Óscar Alonso Peno delivered the talk “God’s face and trace in Jesus”. In order to make the participants become aware of the “god” that they were adoring, he used a creative activity in which everyone took part. The school must not forget but rather announce with joy that from Jesus Christ on, it is only through human beings that we can venerate authentic images of God.
María Fe Ramos, mother and Bible expert, titled her talk of the morning of the 25th “Take and read… What do I take? How do I read? Of what am I afraid?” She invited the participants to sow the world of children and youth from the most loved and tender passages of the Bible in the style of Augustine.
Augustinian Federation of Spain (FAE)
The FAE organizes activities in different areas and has published a number of works; many of these are a collaboration of expert Augustinologists; others gather the conferences of the Seminars that have been held. Among the published works we must mention “Witnesses in the School” (22 issues) and “Booklets of Spirituality” (50 issues). The FAE takes advantage of these events to introduce new publications both of their own and of others that have special bearing to the field of education. Presented in this Seminar were a total of 24 booklets of the collection “Encounter”, under the general title of Augustinian Seminar on Family Apostolate. These booklets were written by various Augustinian authors and others who are permeated with the Augustinian spirituality and are very useful for the family apostolate.