The annual meeting of the Steering Committee of the HEST project on 21 November in Brussels.

If last year it was the Universidad Pontificia Comillas that hosted this event, on this occasion the meeting took place in Brussels, specifically in the meeting room of the Ecumenical European Chapel of the Resurrection, a work entrusted to the Society of Jesus in the European capital.
The place chosen was not by chance. The Chapel represents this meeting place for Christians of different confessions at the very heart of the political and economic life of the Belgian capital. We are Catholics, but with very different backgrounds, and HEST is for us, in some way, the Chapel of the Resurrection.

Franck Janin, president of the Jesuit Conference of European Provincials chaired the session, which was attended by the coordinators of the 7 clusters that make up the project, as well as representatives of other networks that collaborate with HEST, namely, Father Philip Geister for the Kircher network, Father Peter Rozic for JESC and Father Jaime Tatay for the network of European cultural magazines.

The meeting began with a moment of shared prayer and an address by Father Janin himself in which he welcomed all those present and invited us to celebrate the meeting and to look to the future of the project with renewed hope. Later, Father Philip Geister took the floor, and made a presentation of the Kircher network, which will become the matrix of the HEST project in the future.

Once this introductory round was over, we moved on to the core of the meeting, which consisted of a presentation by the coordinators of the state of their different clusters. It was a long and enriching session in which we could see the magnitude of the work done, as well as the difficulties we have encountered along the way.

After a brief shared lunch, we moved on to the afternoon session, during which the results of a survey on the evolution and future of the project were briefly presented, and the coordinators were asked to work on some questions arising from the results of the survey. Finally, the meeting closed with a plenary round where the answers to the previous questions were shared.

The coordinators of the project finished the day exhausted but at the same time very satisfied to have been able to verify that HEST is already a fact. The project is underway, bearing fruits and looking to the future with optimism. Now is the time to start designing together what we want HEST to become in the long term.