EDUCATION FOR PEACE .
Excerpt from the program of the SIGNIS World Congress 2017
Dear participants in the SIGNIS World Congress 2017,
It is my pleasure to bid you welcome to our World Congress, a unique opportunity to share and celebrate, to renew our thinking and learn from the experiences and insights of fellow communicators from all corners of the globe. The theme of the Congress is Media for a Culture of Peace: Promoting Stories of Hope.
By coming together, renewing old friendships and forming new ones across so many different languages and cultures, we are sending a first and most eloquent message of hope. Because the Congress is, first and foremost, about encountering friends, old and new, face to face. In cementing friendships, nothing beats a smile, a handshake, an embrace. We will have plenty of opportunities to celebrate those encounters. The Congress is also a time to learn from others and to contribute our experience. There will be plenary sessions and workshops covering a wide variety of areas of the rapidly changing world of communications. We are challenged to respond positively and creatively to those changes, and the Congress provides a truly global, culturally diverse environment, ideally suited to promote the required responses.
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I look forward to a Congress where there is an active dialogue across generations as well as cultures. New situations require new approaches, a capacity for thinking “outside the box” which is the trademark of the younger generation, and I hope that they will contribute their energy and dynamism.
For SIGNIS, the Congress is the time to chart the course for the future, in continuity with a long, fruitful history of almost 90 years of service, but also with imagination and inventiveness, as our times demand. I want to thank you for participating and contributing to our exchange of ideas and experiences, an essential factor in our planning. I know the effort, financial and otherwise, that many of you had to make to be here. I want to express our deepest gratitude to you all for that.
I certainly hope that the experience of this Congress will change us all in a most positive way, so that when we go back to our daily work as communicators, its memory will translate into feelings of renewal, dynamism and, most of all, inspired commitment.
May God bless you all and bless SIGNIS.
Gustavo Andújar, President of SIGNIS