Culture & Identity on Rielo Institute for Integral Development

What Do We Leave in People?

Pier Paolo Bucalo, PhD — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Organizations measure almost everything: revenues, costs, productivity, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Hospitals measure clinical outcomes; universities measure academic performance; public institutions measure expenditure and efficiency. These indicators matter. No organization survives for long without producing results. But are results sufficient to define success? A company can increase its profits while creating anxiety among the people who work there. A hospital can achieve excellent clinical outcomes while leaving patients feeling unseen. A university can prepare students to pass examinations without helping them discover their talents. A public institution can digitalize a service while making it harder for citizens to understand. Perhaps we have become very effective at measuring what organizations produce, and much less capable of measuring what they produce in people.

Deep Lament as a Remedy to Superficial Complaints

Marie-Thérèse Gerstner, S.S.L. — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We live in a culture that has made optimism a duty. Think positive. Count your blessings. Others have it worse. Pain is to be managed, distracted, scrolled away: a thousand short videos, another evening out, one more painkiller so that we can keep moving the injured arm. Christians have often baptized this reflex. Prayer becomes a row of little hearts: thank you, God; Jesus loves you; all is well. None of this is false, and gratitude is indispensable. But we arrive there too quickly. A gratitude reached in a hurry rings hollow, because it has never looked at what is not well at all. The Bible is far less embarrassed by pain and lament than we are. Depending on how one counts, the Psalter holds some fifteen to twenty psalms of thanksgiving and sixty to seventy psalms of lament, more than a third of the prayer book Jews and Christians have shared for over two thousand years. “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.” Jesus died with such a psalm on his lips.

The Last Carnival Dance

Riccardo Colasanti MD — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What is happiness? For much of the West, happiness is living in a society that’s like a massive amusement park—a noisy, colorful world where one can get by by hopping from one digital game to another, always young, always having fun, and always entertaining others. The progress of nations can only aim for this ultimate goal. After all, the great dream—“Make It Great Again”—is to expand the amusement park and equip it with even more beautiful and newer rides: if possible, without having to pay for them. Certainly, the land of milk and honey, the Shangri-La, is threatened by villains, terrorists, migrants, and the world’s poor. But let them stay out. A good whack with a baton will be enough to make them flee, or a nice deportation program—an expression of the great charity of Western thought. We have degraded ourselves so much that we have reached our lowest point. The Land of Plenty, Shangri-La—if you look closely—seems more like a ballroom with a broken heater, where worn-out seniors with dyed hair are still looking for a dance partner. With ordinary, worn-out music.

The family yesterday and today

Angel Rodriguez Guerro PhD — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Being a person is not something added on; it is not a quality or characteristic of the human being: it is the very way in which a human being exists, the very essence of their being. Dignity is not tied to moral, physical, or intellectual qualities, but simply to the fact that the person “is”—to the fact that, as an individual of the human species, they occupy an absolutely special place in creation.

With fond memories of Delors

Silvia Gonzalez Perez PhD — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1996, UNESCO released the Delors Report “Learning: The Treasure Within” prepared by a commission of experts from various countries (educators, sociologists, political scientists, among others) led by Jacques Delors, which stated that students should learn to be, to do, to know, and to live together; and that education was a necessary utopia and an expression of love for children and adolescents, for whom the path to building a better future should be paved; We in the education sector felt inspired; we believed that a new era was dawning, in which all stakeholders—educational institutions, governments, international organizations, students, and teachers—would join forces to transform education into a driving force for human and social development.

Ghosting

Cristina Scorrano — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The term “Ghosting,” derived from the English word “ghost,” was added to the Treccani dictionary’s list of neologisms in 2024. The definition reads as follows: “Suddenly and without explanation, cutting off all contact with a person, making oneself untraceable.” Digital anthropology and psychology, within their respective fields of scientific inquiry, have described this phenomenon, which has become increasingly widespread in the age of online relationships and causes a painful sense of abandonment in those who experience it. Digital anthropology studies and seeks to understand the impact of information technologies on the human beings who use them. “One of the aims of anthropology, as Gaetano Piccolo S.J. states, is to foster self-understanding in human beings, that is, to activate a process of awareness of the existential and cultural dynamics in which they find themselves living.” In the 1990s, researchers Daniel Miller and Don Slater launched a study to examine the use and influence of the Internet on the inhabitants of the island of Trinidad. Their pioneering studies in digital anthropology contributed to defining the Internet not only as a source of information and knowledge but as a space where individuals develop and experience existing relational dynamics; the people of Trinidad used the web to communicate with distant loved ones, or forged new ones by creating unpredictable forms of connection and new community formations. These findings led to moving beyond the “digital/virtual” and “material/real” dichotomy to highlight the mutual influence of the two spheres. The “real” informs the “digital,” and the “digital” causes the “real” to evolve in new ways. The rapid and pervasive development of digital technologies has profoundly changed culture, the economy, human identity, and interpersonal relationships. For this reason, an increasingly deep understanding of how humans use technologies across various socio-cultural contexts is essential for analyzing the changes occurring in individuals’ mindsets and inner lives. Social networks and social media have become spaces of belonging, social recognition, professional interaction, communication, and the sharing of passions and feelings.

Memory and Conflict

Afua A. Tuwumasi-Ankrah, Basilio Monteiro PhD — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most stubborn memories is conflict. Conflicts disrupt stability and leave deep physical, psychological, spiritual, and cultural scars on both the individual and the communities they belong to. In communities, these memories of conflict are perpetuated intergenerationally.

Conflicts often emerge from the ambitions and exploitation of the powerful, imposed on those with less agency. We often remember conflicts as acts of patriotic virtue—ritualized in ways that shape national and civic identity.