Knotenpunkt – Begegnung verbindet may be translated as Crossroads – connected through encounter. Why did we choose this name for our association?

Human beings are searchers. With all their freedom, Intuition, and love, they seek to live a beautiful and fulfilled life. Reason and intelligence help them to recognize their interior desires and exterior needs and to discover and develop responses to them. In order to do that persons do not only on an interior journey. Rather, explorers, missionaries, merchants, scientists and other searchers have traversed the roads, rivers, and oceans of our world. Wherever they encountered unpredictable and surprising things that pertained to their quest and challenged their way of life, they paused.

Crossroads emerged, places where existential questions were raised and experiences and scientific insights exchanged. Useful and beautiful goods changed their owners there and people started to construct an new and attractive way of live in the most diverse forms. Markets, cities, and monasteries serve as a few examples for such places.

Also for us today, at the very beginning there was and still is an encounter. It is the meeting between the searcher and a reality that strikes him or her as a response of greater truth and promise than anything he or she had so far experienced.  The proposal of a response arises that invites to be explored and checked out.

Such an encounter unites persons of the most diverse backgrounds, cultures, and religions. Exploring this encounter is primarily not a matter of an astute engagement of ideas. It is much more fruitful to communicate to others our personal life and experiences. Thus we can introduce the life of the other into our own and vice versa. The emphasis lies on personhood and personal freedom.