Publisher's Synopsis
A decade, a century, and a millennium are all ending and the European Union is facing unprecedented challenges and new questioning about its competence to meet them. A small group of Catholic academics, Jesuits and lay people, coming from five different countries, decided they would like to address this issue of European integration. They wanted to do so as a team, joining their different academic and national backgrounds in order to arrive at a common assessment of the process of European unification. They also wanted to discover what one could say about this secular event from a perspective of Christian faith and ethics. This collective work can be read, therefore, as an excercise in Christian discernment on an important 'sign of the times' by an international group of academics, both committed as citizens and as disciples. It contains both a number of historical assessments on the past and present of the European project, and a selection of systematic reflections, focusing on such burning issues as employment, North/South relations, financial markets and the meaning of European citizenship. The final result is a truly inter-disciplinary study, which combines elements of academic rigor, ethical assessment, and faith reflection on a major contemporary political event.
