Day 3 – CONVERSION
Confronting a narcissistic culture, what is called the “me” generation, we shall acknowledge that the secular western self has not and will not disappear. The attempts to deconstruct it and to make it only intuitive, immediate, impulsive, extatic, nothing but spontaneous erotic creativity have not succeeded, though this has been the chief effort of humanistic education, many religious and most cultural institutions for some time. Even if objectifying knowledge, selfish calculation, technocratic and bureaucratic control for the sake of pleasure are only decadent forms of the western self, they remind us of how tough it is and how well established. After all we Augustinians know that this selfishness was established face to face with God. To make it healthy again it must, like Augustine, be converted.