Living Togetherin a Post-Secular Europe

CoGREE, Berlin, October 6, 2005

Bert Roebben

Faculty of Theology

Tilburg University, the Netherlands

www.seekingsense.be

Introduction: post-secular Europe

• As a Christian theologian in permanent response to the movements and counter-movements of culture

• In the heart of modernity, we remain unsatisfied. We thought we could solve issues by mastering them and by reducing their complexity, but now this same complexity is forcing us into a deepened reflection on who we are

• “What happens to me? I am looking for the meaning of life, while I am so busy with reducing complexity”

• Crisis of experience: how to live a life of dedication, in response to an ultimate reality, in the heart of modernity?

• Religious traditions are no longer the ultimate frames of reference, because they are part of the same complexity

• So it is more than just a tradition crisis – how to respond to the situation by adapting the gospel to it, from an archimedic point of view

• People are annexing religion to cope with complexity, if need be with violence, in order to achieve security and segregation from others

• Churches and religious institutions are part of the market anthropology: they are suppliers of religiosity and spirituality (Rodney Stark)

Introduction: living together

• We live an a complex context, we should not smooth matters over – no banalisation or harmonisation of complexity

• What needs to be done is to explore cultural and religious differences of interpretation through education:

• By thematising/documenting (multi)• By learning to communicate (inter)• By integrating into the biography of the learner (intra)

• Living together is not a soft and simple ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’, but a complex and exciting adventure of holding out the differences

• Living together means: ‘living in difference’

1. Religion in Europe

• ‘European Values Study’ (cfr. Atlas of European Values, Tilburg, 2005)

• Secularisation – no more overarching ‘sacred canopy’ (Peter Berger) – functional differentiation – religion in the private sphere – churchification and dogmatisation of religion

• Modernisation: individualisation, pluralisation, de-traditionalisation – ‘New religious longing’ (Anton van Harskamp), ‘off road religion’ (Heinz Streib), ‘bricolage’ of religiosity and spirituality – churches on the market place (increase of evangelical and charismatic congregations in cities)

• ‘Believing without belonging’ (Grace Davie): in NL, CZ and EST more people consider themselves to be religious than there are members of the church

Belief systems in Europe (EVS 1999/2000)

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

Poland France Holland

Theistic

Spiritual

Agnostic

Atheistic

Conflicting values in Europe

• Freedom of conscience and religion

• The right to organise one’s own life, in response to an ultimate reality, whether transcendent or not

• The right to religious socialisation and education (Friedrich Schweitzer, Das Recht des Kindes auf Religion, 2000)

• Communitarianism

• The right of private meaning giving embedded and exercised in a multicultural and multireligious society

• Shared values: respect, tolerance, protection of those who are vulnerable

• Liberalism

2. Education and interreligious encounter

• 2.1. Religious socialisation• 2.2. Religious education in the secondary school• 2.3. Multi- and inter-religious learning• 2.4. The otherness of the other in the classroom• 2.5. Learning by encounter• 2.6. Religious education, narrative identity and soul care

2.1. Religious socialisation

• Primary religious socialisation (home and congregation) puzzled by the question ‘How to find words for deeper experiences?’ – no experience substratum in churches for the complex life issues of contemporaries – crisis of credibility of churches in a postmodern learning society (Norbert Mette) – educational uncertainty of parents and lacking biographical advise for young people – different experience of being young today (extended youth biography)

• Tertiary religious socialisation (peer group) under pressure of market and media: interactive meaning giving – building schemes only completed after the action – annexing religious traditions – retrosocialisation of adults

• And what about secondary religious socialisation (school)?

2.2. RE in the secondary school• RE influenced by the contemporary boost of reflexivity or

accelerated hermeneutic awareness: ‘das Recht auf Denken über religiöses Denken’ (Friedrich Schweitzer, in JfKTh 2003)

• Young people as self-reliant learners, dealing with processes of interactive meaning giving (no more linear-chronological interpretation of moral and religious development)

• ‘Hermeneutic-communicative’ approaches in RE: learning to perceive religions/religiosity, to communicate about this perpection with others and to clarify one’s own point of view

• Dialogue with other belief systems in the depth of time (intergenerational), in the breadth of space (intercultural) and against the horizon of the future (global)

• Modern schools experience an appeal to their ‘response-abilty’ to the quest of young people, by offering them valid ‘mental detours’ (Paul Ricoeur)

2.3. Multi- and inter-religious learning

Thematise and document

Communicate

Knowing the other Respecting the other

Learning about religion

Learning from religion

Multi-religious learning

Inter-religious learning

2.4. Otherness of the other in the classroom

Resistance in the learning process, ‘hermeneutic junctions and interpretation differences’ (Herman Lombaerts): “That’s the way religious people give answers to issues of meaning giving, but how about you, sir/madam? Do not harmonise the learning process!”

• (multi) ‘How far can I walk in the mocassins of the other?’ (Heinz Streib) – particular elements in the classroom can remain non-accessible and radically foreign to the learner

• (inter) Can I handle the communication? – the classroom can be not safe for diversity or students could get stuck in testing the trustworthiness of the other

• (intra) Can I deal with this for myself? – students can run into internal fallibilities (Hanan Alexander) or ‘holy envy’ (Mary Boys)

2.5. Learning by encounter

“What do I have to learn from you, if we do not differ? Why should I learn anything at all, if it doesn’t make a difference where you come from, who you are and what you believe in? Defining moments in education occur when differences in interpretation come to the surface: you are different from me, you appeal to my imagination, your thoughts trigger mine, your ways are unknown to me, but yet I want to know you, you intrigue me. This is me, how about you?”

– Learning by encounter– Learning ‘in the presence of the other’ (Mary Boys)– Learning in difference

“These mist covered mountains, are a home now for me. But my home is the lowlands and always will be. Some day you’ll return to your valleys and your farms, and you’ll no longer burn to be brothers in arms.Through these fields of destruction, baptisms of fire. I’ve watched all your suffering as the battles raged higher. And though they did hurt me so bad in the fear and alarm. You did not desert me, my brothers in arms.There’s so many different worlds, so many different suns. And we have just one world, but we live in different ones. Now the sun’s gone to hell and the moon’s riding high. Let me bid you farewell, every man has to die. But it’s written in the starlight and every line in your palm: we’re fools to make war on our brothers in arms.”[Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms, 1986]

 

 

 

Thematise and document

Communicate Integrate

Knowing the other Respecting the other Knowing/respecting myself

Learning about religion

Learning from religion Learning in religion(narrative identity and soul care)

Multi-religious learning

Inter-religious learning

Intra-religious learning

Competence with respect to the content (Sachkompetenz)

Social competence(perspective change)

Argumentative competence(towards a personal synthesis)

 

2.6. RE, narrative identity and soul care

• The modern spiritual quest is an answer to the ‘culturally constructed forgetfulness’ (David Hay). It is referring to the central characteristic of religious experience: “I have already been seen in my deepest self, I have already been found within my searching. I am already grounded, I do not need to ground myself. And when I fall, I will never land up into ultimate meaninglessness”

• Narrative identity as a personal synthesis of my relation to my own (!) ultimate reality, in response to others – this is a project of the soul (“Where do I come from, where do I go to?”)

• RE as ‘soul care’ – discovering your own resistant soul in the heart of modernity, with an eye to humanity as a whole – ‘transformative learning’ (Helmut Peukert)

3. Narthical religious learning

• The narthex is the portal of the church, the place in-between inside and outside, the space of daily passage between life and sacred life

• The narthex can be used as a metaphor for RE: not understood as the anthropological pre-stage before entering the intimate sacred space of the inner church, but as a public space in which the pilgrim can recover from his/her journey and story, and can be confronted with stories that come radically from elsewhere

• The narthex is the space of passage between longing and perspective, between thirst and satisfying one’s thirst

• This narthical encounter is both pedagogical (new images to reframe my own narrative identity) and theological (new images that remind me of the ‘received character’ of my life, of my soul)

www.lejourduseigneur.com/vezelay/00.htm

• To listen carefully to the longing of contemporaries – to be ready and to be competent to ‘decongeal’ (or ‘liquify’) the key elements of religious traditions into key stories, rituals, texts, experiences

• To make deliberate choices: ‘Elementarisierung’ – what are the kind of unarticulated questions to be addressed and to be made transparent by these key stories? What kind of key elements are intelligible today to stimulate vision and discernment?

• A new frame of theological hermeneutics is needed, in every modern religion (!): in texts (e.g. bible and tradition), rituals and liturgy, political action, re-reading European culture, etc.

• New traditions (patterns, reflections and even contents) are orginating from this RE work: how to encourage young people?

Conclusion: remaining questions

• Building leadership and identification figures in teacher training• Stay focused on the well-being of future generations, not loose

oneself in the continuation of religious and/or education systems• The multicultural and multireligious Europe as a space of

discovery and challenge (avoid hypocrisy and cynicism)• From crisis to kairos – reinvent ‘Theologie der Hoffnung’ through

a ‘Religionspädagogik der Hoffnung’ – Hope that makes a difference, here at the borders of the Wannsee (20th of January 1942)

• Living together = Living in difference

“One of the purposes of education is that individuals and communities should flourish, should grow strong and be fruitful, should be creatively at home in a beautiful and restored environment, in which human life and nature can together be renewed. When we ask about the contribution of Christian faith to education in modern Europe, we must ask what stops our children and our young people from flourishing. It is poverty, ethnic and racial tension and hostility, lack of community, and above all, the ethos created by the money-mad society. Those who live for money will live stunted and selfish lives, but those who live for others in human solidarity will flourish like the tree that is planted beside the living waters. The role of the Christian churches in Europe is not to control education, not to domesticate it or to turn it into something it cannot and should not be, but to enable it to flourish.” (John Hull, in BJRE 2004).

“Haben gerade die religiösen Traditionen der Menschheit etwas mit solchen fundamentalen Erfahrungen des Umbruchs, der Erschütterung und des Überschreitens von Gegebenem ins Unbegangene zu tun und können und müssen sie deshalb jeweils neu interpretiert werden?” (Helmut Peukert, in RpB 2002).