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OUR pROGAM

Moving School
Vietnam 2024

Theme: “Youth Promoting Good Catholics and Good Citizens by Working for the Poor and Marginalized in the Rapidly Changing Vietnam”

April 13th – 18th 2024 

Benjamin Retreat House, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

CONCEPT NOTE

INTRODUCTION

In Asian context, it is natural that the ALL Forum’s programs put more stress on religious plurality and dialogue among religions and cultures in the continent. Asian Christian youth are living in a complex situation, being part of a minority religion and having such diverse religious traditions including those from Indigenous Peoples’ (IPs) communities and various local cultures. They have experienced and even suffered from denying their own cultures. Sometimes, they feel a sense of guilt because some of their families are a tribe’s leaders or shamans and related to IPs’ traditional religions prescribed as ‘superstitions’ which is not in uncommon.

For this reason, ALL Forum needs to ensure and inspire young people that their religious and cultural traditions are a gift, not evils that threaten Christianity, and that deepening their faith embraced by Catholicism can help them become a good citizen based on the intercultural and multicultural spirituality too. Laypeople are the ones who live their daily lives specifically, so in this sense lay spirituality is of everyday spirituality. Everything revealed in our daily lives is God’s presence, and it does not ask for discrimination among religions. Cultural diversity is something we must care for, preserve, and accept as gift, so that we can be enriched by them as experiences of the Great Spirit of God among all of us. Not religious dualism nor discrimination, but the abundance of various religious traditions in Asia, is what Catholicism means to be and what should be significant feature of universal church. Such diversity flowing throughout Asia is a main source that can provide rich theological ideas and spiritual inspiration to the world churches. These terminologies of religio-cultural diversity not from theory but people’s lives themselves, lay spirituality based on daily life, and intercultural citizenship which embraces Western citizenship or civility culminated in modernity for the betterment of the world including the church, and adult-faith development through which Christians are to be flourishing or blooming not only being survived are the keywords needed to be put as overarching ideas for all the programs of ALL Forum.

TIME TABLE

The format of the MOVING SCHOOL program is Workshop, Field Trip, Cultural Exploration & Visitation. Read more the program detail schedule here. 

DOCUMENTATION

We collected some captures during the Moving School Vietnam 2024 program.