Introduction

Reflection on personal and cultural identity in an age of globalization and fragmentation, of integration and disintegration certainly is not new. In face of the process of globalization scholars of the problem had to observe how the profound transformations triggered by it have touched not only social life, but are totally restructuring our way of living. “It’s mistaken to think,” writes Antony Giddens,” that globalization regards only the big systems, like the world financial order: it touches not only what is “outside”, remote and distant from the individual, but is also an internal phenomenon, which influences intimate and personal aspects of our life”.¹ It is not one incident in our normal, everyday lives as they’ve always been. It is a change of the very conditions of our existence.  It is the way in which we live today.”²

How much, then, globalization influences the already laborious processes that mark the growth of each person in his/her journey of individuation and elaboration of their personal and cultural identity, the problem has been at the center of attention of different disciplines, from sociology, to cultural anthropology, to psychology and pedagogy for some time. If interdependence on a planetary level, mobility and intensification of world social interactions, the crumbling of “real” interpersonal relationships for the sake of “virtual” ones, the compression or compacting of time and space, of styles of life and cultures, are the coordinates within which the new generations are growing up, within which  they build their identity and make their life choices, then it is necessary to reflect seriously on the fallout of these by now unstoppable phenomena on formation processes, beginning with the discovery of one’s vocation to the consolidation of one’s vocational and charismatic identity.

Paraphrasing the text of Giddens we could say that globalization is redesigning our life and religious life itself, by its significant repercussions on ethical attitudes, on the way of experiencing time and programming, on corporeity and sexuality, relationships and therefore one’s very identity.

The rediscovery of cultural and identity diversity, the dangers and degenerations of multi-culturalism, the difficulty to conciliate ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity with the socio-political unity of nations or a unity in communion of a religious institute, constitute equally as many demands that need attention and that must be faced with balance and creativity, keeping in mind the repercussions both on persons and communities as well as on the charism.