As the theme of this year’s New York Encounter indicates, we often feel uprooted and adrift. Told that we should be suspicious of the past and constantly reminded of its many flaws, we are also encouraged to continually reinvent, rebrand, reimagine our own identities. The memory of the past is often left behind in favor of a future that is a total blank.

But an encounter with another can change this experience. “Here begins a new life,” Dante Alighieri wrote when he met Beatrice. The encounter with beauty in the form of another person changed Dante’s life, redirecting it for good.

The New York Encounter this year explores how the encounter with a Presence of beauty, love, and goodness can transform our lonely and directionless lives. This encounter, heals our relationship with the past and can unlock a new vision of the present and the future: as Giussani wrote, “whatever you remember is a fragment of being that rises from the sepulcher, and the different fragments, coming together, rearrange themselves into a design that is no longer just a promise, but a promise that is already being fulfilled.”

The weekend will help attendees see this design: from a presentation on the mesmerizing beauty of a peacock’s tail by Michael Waldstein, a professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, to a witness on healing the past from Leo Schofield, wrongfully imprisoned for 35 years.

What does it mean to seek meaningful connection in the contemporary age? Several panels at the Encounter will explore this question. Michael Hanby, John Milbank, and Aaron Riches will discuss Giussani’s In Search of the Human Face, newly published in English. Christine Rosen, Carter Snead, and Paolo Carozza will consider what it means for humans to be embodied in an age of virtual reality. Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, and Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, will discuss the feeling of precariousness that characterizes a world where human beings are increasingly isolated from one another.

How do we address the current American political climate? Why have children? The need for human connection is not an isolated, individual act. Panels on climate change, the experience of immigrants and those who welcome them, and the crisis in the Holy Land will shed light on the choices we make as a society — how best to make them and how to change them.

And throughout the weekend, meditations on beauty in various forms will shed light on our practical questions: the beauty of nature in the form of scientific research, the insights of literature in the works of Cormac McCarthy (read through a musical lens) and J.R.R. Tolkien. The Encounter will both begin and end with musical events: at the beginning a piano concert by Kuok-Wai Lio paired with Giussani’s reflections on music, and at the end a final night of celebration and songs with the Encounter’s volunteers.

The Encounter’s rich program includes more events than can be named here. Visit the website to learn more, and attend the events on February 14-16. As with Dante, the encounter with beauty will motivate us to a spirit of renewal: “here begins a new life.”