“I cannot say ‘I’ if I do not say ‘you’”
(Luigi Giussani)

A presentation of The Meaning of Birth, a conversation between Fr. Luigi Giussani, founder of Communion and Liberation, and Giovanni Testori, playwright, with Phil Klay, author, Margarita Mooney, Associate Professor of Congregational Studies, Princeton Theological Seminary, Rowan Williams, theologian, and Greg Wolfe, writer and managing director of Slant Books

What does it mean to recognize yourself—or any other being—as a person? It’s a question that comes up in all sorts of different contexts, from debates about the unborn child to animal rights to issues in the development of artificial intelligence, and the answers are chaotically diverse. But in this book, we have an answer that is genuinely startling and distinctive, with the broadest implications. We are not invited to think about what orally or intellectually interesting qualities something needs in order to count as a person; instead, we are reminded of a bare physical fact: we were born.

There was a moment when our parents underwent a transitory visitation of self-abandonment and a new material process began, a clustering of cells into a new organic unit. And this cell cluster, as soon as it begins to exist as a definite organic reality, is launched on a process that will inevitably involve a unique relationship to the rest of the physical world—a story, a destiny, a set of memories and hopes, a way of speaking and seeing. Life was begun for us, not by us. It was given us, in the shape of this cell cluster; a literal physical place was made for us, and this is why and how we are persons.

Rowan William, from the Foreword for The Meaning of Birth