The project St. Jerome’s Forge of Words (Svetojeronimska kovačnica riječi) arose from the need to develop a comprehensive scientific, cultural, and educational framework for reaffirming the Word as the fundamental bearer of truth, identity, and community amid an increasingly pronounced semantic crisis and the disintegration of communicative values. At the center of the research interest stands the figure of St. Jerome — an original thinker, translator, and interpreter of Sacred Scripture, but also a symbol of spiritual precision, linguistic culture, and intellectual responsibility — whose work and reception offer a unique key to understanding the role of the word in theological, cultural, and social reality. The project begins with an awareness of the deep crisis of meaning in contemporary word culture. In an age dominated by algorithmically mediated messages, an inflation of superficial content, and communication increasingly subject to instrumentalization, a return is needed to the original understanding of the word as a place of truth, discernment, and responsibility. In this sense, the project is not merely retrospective — focused on historical analysis — but also deeply prospective: it develops a conceptual model that offers answers to the contemporary challenges of semantic and communicative disorientation.
Although St. Jerome has been the subject of numerous philological, literary, and historical studies, there is no systematic, interdisciplinary project in the Croatian academic space that analyzes his legacy in light of today’s challenges in interpreting, transmitting, and living the Word. It is precisely St. Jerome — the founder of Latin biblical culture, an advocate of women’s education, a spiritual heir of monastic asceticism, and a polemical thinker — who offers a paradigmatic model for understanding the Word as a spiritual and cultural act. His translation of Sacred Scripture into Latin was not merely a technical act of translation but a profound conceptual transformation of meaning and a transmission of the sacred text into the level of cultural memory. In this context, Jerome becomes a model for both theological thought and educational and cultural responsibility toward language. The project is therefore conceived as an integrated body of thought and research that connects exegetical, philosophical-theological, historical-cultural, and communicative approaches, with the goal of developing a new literacy for the age of the digital mediatization of language.
The project is structured into three complementary work packages, corresponding to three levels of the concept of the Word: the exegetical-theological (the Word as Revelation), the cultural-historical (the Word as memory), and the media-communicative (the Word as transmission and reception).