“Today’s big challenge is living in the plurality of a new, broader scope and everyone’s having to adapt in an unprecedented way”. While "for Christians, this means accepting other religions", for "Muslims, it means revising Islam”, living it “from a democratic and lay perspective”. This is a passage from the comments of Jean-Dominique Durand, a historian at Lyons University, published on the first page of SIR Europa. According to Durand,”we are immersed in a pluralist world in terms of religions and ethnic groups”, and the effects of such pluralism "in European society, almost all of a sudden are multiplied by urbanisation, which has kick-started and maintained a crisis of social cohabitation”. “It is the problem of any city highlights the expert which we have to tackle if we want to prevent suburban ghettoes springing up”. Hence, says Durand, the need to "build cities on a human scale, a urban civilisation based on the culture of cohabitation, to design cities as a shared space, because the risks of conflicts caused by the fast and often traumatic emergence of multiculturalism are substantial”. This issue of SIR Europa includes a report from Martin Kmerec, a Slovenian Franciscan friar who was attacked on February 9th by some Turkish nationalists in Smyrna.
