Living Together in a PostSecular Europe CoGREE, Berlin, October 6, 2005

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Living Togetherin a Post-Secular EuropeCoGREE,
Berlin, October 6, 2005

• Bert Roebben
• Faculty of Theology
• Tilburg University, the Netherlands
• www.seekingsense.be

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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?

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• 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)

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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

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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

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Belief systems in Europe (EVS 1999/2000)
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Conflicting values in Europe

• Freedom of conscience and religion
• The right to organise ones 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

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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

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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)?

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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 ones 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)

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2.3. Multi- and inter-religious learning
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2.4. Otherness of the other in the classroom

• Resistance in the learning process, hermeneutic
  junctions and interpretation differences (Herman
  Lombaerts) Thats 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)

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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
  doesnt 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

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• These mist covered mountains, are a home now
  for me. But my home is the lowlands and always
  will be. Some day youll return to your valleys
  and your farms, and youll no longer burn to be
  brothers in arms.
• Through these fields of destruction, baptisms of
  fire. Ive 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.
• Theres so many different worlds, so many
  different suns. And we have just one world, but
  we live in different ones. Now the suns gone to
  hell and the moons riding high. Let me bid you
  farewell, every man has to die. But its written
  in the starlight and every line in your palm
  were fools to make war on our brothers in arms.
• Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms, 1986

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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)

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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 ones 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)

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• www.lejourduseigneur.com/vezelay/00.htm

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• 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?

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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

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• 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).

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• 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).