Boston College offers a MOOC (massive open online course) on Common discernment and decision making in a Synodal Church.
This Course includes some of the most relevant topics and speakers on this area, some of them are:
- Responsibility and Teamwork by Nathalie Becquart and Philippe Becquart);
- Leadership in the Church by David McCallum;
- Consensus Building by Emili Turú;
- Models of Discernment in Asia by Christina Kheng;
- Discernment in Common by Laurence Lubières;
- Decision-making and decision-taking models in the Church by Serena Noceti;
The course format is as follows:
- Introductory Lectures to the program
- Week 1 offers some criteria that will help to assess and deepen the theology and practice of communal discernment and the building of ecclesial consensus.
- Week 2 focuses on the elaboration and decision making in the Church. One of the great challenges for a new institutional model.Week 3 and final weeks offers reflections on leadership and governance in the Church, and how many of the changes in the Church in the third millennium depend on this.
This program is asynchronous and participants can complete all elements of the course in their own time. Each week requires a time commitment of approximately three hours. The registration for this course is free and it opened on July 4th.
Please, find in this link the access to the course and all information related: https://formaciononline.bc.edu/en/courses/synodal-discernment/
Fr. Giacomo Costa SJ did studies in philosophy and theology, and he also obtained a master's degree in Political and Moral Sociology at the EHESS in Paris.
He is the responsible for Formation at the Society of Jesus.
Prof. Rafael Luciani received his licentiate and doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and a degree in educational sciences with a philosophical orientation from the Universidad Católica "Andrés Bello" in Caracas (Venezuela). He also studied philosophy at the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome and did post-doctoral work at the Julius Maximilians Universität in Würzburg (Germany).
Nathalie Becquart serves as Undersecretary of the Secretariat of the Synod of the Bishops since March 2021.
Robert J. Bies (Ph.D., Stanford University) is Professor of Management and Founder of the Executive Master’s in Leadership Program at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. In addition, Dr. Bies is a co-author of the book, Getting Even: The Truth About Workplace Revenge—And How to Stop It.
Professor Bies’s current research focuses on leadership, the delivery of bad news, organizational justice, and revenge and forgiveness in the workplace.