Abstract

The dialogue published here stems from a question that has always engaged Sergio Givone’s thinking: what is left of God in the age of secularisation? Can the «unconditional demand for meaning» that comes from individual lives still be heard, without this demand being betrayed and consigned to a kind of foolish indifference, if not derision? Our existences are called into question, squeezed on the one hand by vulnerability and on the other by the search for a fullness that can barely be approached. While Pascal evoked the profound bewilderment and dismay that grips us in the face of the «great emptiness», at the same time the human claim to occupy God’s empty stage has regained strength in an increasingly exaggerated and parodic manner. Finally, in the dramatic times we are forced to live in, there is a search for a renewed spirituality that escapes the institutionalisation of the religious. So, we can also afford to remove the problem of the existence of God, reduced to an idol. Rather, as Sergio Givone points out, what matters is «the sense or non-sense of being in the world», of believing that «inhabiting the world is not a senseless thing, but has meaning, even an ultimate meaning».