Here’s a few observations I have about where we are in developing a critical religious education
First of all, I’m writing from square in the middle of my own tradition: Roman Catholic Christianity. (Well, I see myself in the middle, surrounded on all sides equally by crazies.) And in the ancient tradition: “Grace builds on nature,” that is, God who revealed himself to elicit our faith is the same God who created the cosmos, the natural order, and our reason itself, endowing it all with goodness that has its source in his own goodness. So in our tradition, we hold true to the point that God’s creation will not contradict God’s revelation, and vice versa. True faith will never cancel true science, and vice versa. Those times when this principle has been transgressed, such as the Galileo case, have been huge cause of scandal and rightly condemned and repented. Put another way, by Thomas Aquinas, “Truth is of the Holy Spirit, no matter its source,” as he took the pagan Aristotle’s critical thinking methods and applied them to the revealed faith.
Second, I don’t mean to badmouth anyone — not skeptic atheists, devout believers, hard-working educators, hardly-working educators, students of all stripes, over- and under-involved parents, government policymakers, other faiths… really, no one. I see education and religion as being two especial fields where it doesn’t take long for mud to fly and blame to light up. That’s not my game. But I don’t see the field of religious education producing the kinds of outcomes I feel it’s capable of — I see alot of contradictions, alot of unspoken resentment on all sides, and I want to hold that up to the light to see where we’re at and where we’d like to go.
Third, my interior conversation — here made exterior — keeps waffling back and forth between education — how I earn my living — and religious faith — how I receive my life. And I keep seeing these massive overlaps. One has to do with the prior point: Education seems not to be delivering what Western societies are expecting it to, but it’s not broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do: sort students into good, bad, ugly categories. When I allude to “Constructivism” I have in mind one of the most compelling models of knowledge to shift education towards what we seem to be expecting it to be. In this way, I see religious education as perhaps the most ‘stuck’ or ‘behind’ field — still enmeshed with pedagogies of the past — and with perhaps the greatest potentional to leap forward, to provide a methodology, a praxis, a community of thinkers, that can benefit society and the grander educational project. Maybe it will take me a while to speak clearly what I mean about this.
Finally, I’ve thought about this a whole bunch. I wrote a Master’s thesis on religious educational objectives. Yeah, fun. My theisis started with the question: “What are we trying to accomplish with religious education in the Catholic tradition?” because I had no idea how to answer the question, “How well are we doing in religious education in the Catholic tradition?” because I had no idea how to answer the question “What can we do better in religious education in the Catholic tradition?” It bugged me that I wanted to get better at being a religious educator, but I struggled to identify any kind of consensus of what ways of religious educating were better. So I’ve read a good amount, thought alot, wrote and revised and submitted, but the questions haven’t gone away. And widespread solutions haven’t blossomed on their own.
WHAT DO I SEEK?
I would like a set of principles, best practices, methods and objectives that are exquisitely educationally sound, taking into account the best scientific research and artistic genius that makes for the best teaching, which are also thoroughly and authentically grounded in religious wisdom.
