RADIX, MATRIX

Citizenship can be a central category for rebuilding and renewing democracy, since it best compounds a liberal recognition of the primacy of individual rights with a recognition of the Republican duties generated by belonging to a political community. How to combine, however, the universalizing dynamics of individual rights with the particularistic dynamics typical of the responsibility-bond of communitarian traditions?To get out of this paralyzing divarication, it may be useful to resort to a notion of community belonging as a factor of inclusive and emancipatory universalization, not of exclusive and regressive particularism. This notion finds one of its strongest ideal and historical expressions in Christian ecclesiality. An exegetical and theological reconstruction of the process of self-definition in which particular communities have united as a single community in the early Church can be of great help in focusing questions, answers, possible solutions and difficulties of the current process of internal and external integration of national societies in relation to internal divisive tendencies and processes of undifferentiated external assimilation. I. SECTION From where to where Introduction The Word of God as root and verbal matrix of history Communities in the horizon of globalization Ecclesial universality as a principle of unity and not of identity Ecclesiality as a historical paradigm of the principle of universalization of community belonging: the activation of inclusion as inclusiveness Many peoples: diversity and inter-communitarian communion Inter-communitarian similarity Inter-communitarian cardinality of intersection Inter-communitarian sociality of intersection: interdependence For a non-sovereignist notion of citizenship Giving the right in communion and being mindful of the poor II. SECTION Application horizons For a not unilaterally individualistic reconstruction of human dignity. The complementarity of universalistic communitarism and human rights Community belonging and sociality, an implication at risk The protection of community belonging Universalistic communitarism Community belonging between particularity and universality The case of the family Conclusion