The Embodied Self: Educational and Pastoral Challenges

Abstract

The practical, mercantile, and dialectical materialism that permeates contemporary society represents a monistic reductionism regarding the human body; a monism that denies the spiritual dimension of the human person and leaves unresolved the complexity and unity of both the body and the person.

We are faced with an anthropological reductionism that, by separating agapeic love from sexuality as a way of being of the human person, has led to a devaluation of the person whose dignity was emphasized by the Second Vatican Council through personalist anthropology as an ecclesial response to the secularization of the human body.

Half a century later, this continues to constitute both a pastoral and educational gap within university education, failing to provide a profound response to the challenges of the contemporary world.