Adrien Candiard, member of the Dominican Institute of Oriental Studies (Ideo). Introduction by Bernhard Scholz, President of the Meeting Foundation for Friendship among Peoples ETS

Numerous and incisive are the questions that arise from the growing existential uncertainty of many young and not-so-young people, the fragmentation of social life, an unreliable future, and the increase in conflict and increasingly atrocious wars. Too often, those who let themselves be defined by these and other problems respond with distraction or resignation or with ideological aggression and stubbornness. But is it possible to find a horizon of meaning that allows us to face these challenges constructively, to find creative answers? It is in response to this emergency that we chose as the title of the 45th Rimini Meeting the provocation launched by the American author Cormac McCarthy: ” If we are not after the essence, then what are we after”.