ERNESTO BALDUCCI, LA RIVISTA TESTIMONIANZE E IL PROGETTO PEDAGOGICO DI UN NUOVO UMANESIMO

The cultural journal “Testimonianze” born in Florence in 1958, can be considered a laboratory where Ernesto Balducci (1922-1992), one of its founders, matured his own thought and elaborated the project of a planetary man inhabiting the frontier. It was the 1980s that constituted a real turning point in his reflections, which, at first religious in nature and dedicated to the renewal of the Church, then experienced an anthropological turn that placed at the center of Balducci’s prophecy the building of a world of peace. “If You Want Peace Prepare Peace!” is the title of the conferences that have been organized since 1981 with the aim of creating increasingly frequent opportunities for discussion and dialogue on the themes of war, nonviolence and peace education. The issues of the journal hosted, in those years, heated debates on these topical issues such as the globalization process, the disarmament campaign, human rights, and environmental defense. The red thread running through Balducci's reflections is the theme of peace and nonviolence as the only possible solution for the very survival of humanity, for this reason he founded the publishing house Edizioni Cultura della Pace in 1986. Gandhi’s nonviolence, a way of life and educational practice that he shares with La Pira, Don Milani, and Capitini, is the way to shape a dialogic culture that makes every border a flexible and dynamic frontier, not already a place of separation but a space for welcoming and caring for the other. Between Balducci and “Testimonianze” an intense relationship is created over the years, made up of mutual exchanges that give rise to two differentiated paths, which “intersect, resemble and refer to each other,” without ever overlapping. The journal presents a plurality of voices, and it is thanks to the cultural confrontations that animate the issues published from the late 1970s to 1992, the year of his sudden death, that he, through his last publications, gives life to a prophecy whose protagonist is planetary man, who, educated in nonviolence and a universal citizenship, will have the task of opening a breach within the impassable boundaries so far created by man. It is to planetary man that Balducci entrusts the task of creating a cosmic democracy, the result of an educational work that consists in the construction of a common history and in the mutual recognition of differences no longer relegated beyond the border. These are suggestions that still inspire the pages of the issues of the journal “Testimonianze” in reflecting on the changes taking place in the global world and on the effects, in the psychological, social, economic and educational spheres, of the crisis provoked by the pandemic that, in this period, has affected, albeit in a diverse manner, the populations of the planet.