Person-Centered Solidarity: The Challenge of Religious Education Today
Abstract
This study aims at showing how an understanding of solidarity that is based on the dignity of the human personhood can be a helpful resource in contemporary religious educational practices. Within the tradition of Catholic social teaching, human persons are ontologically sacred and holistic, irrespective of all accidents of earthly. This study critiques the wanton destruction of human lives, and the attitudes of difference that accompany such desecration. The virtue of solidarity challenges every human person to live with a consciousness of the suffering other. To be authentically human is to be in solidary relationship in the paradigm of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Church, especially in, but not limited to her teaching ministry, is challenged with educating persons to revere human personhood. Person-Centered Solidarity explores the two dominant religious education typologies—content-based and process-based—corresponding to the currently operative models of religious education in respective Southern and Northern hemispheres. It critiques these typologies from the curriculum theory of Eliot Eisner. In this critique, Person-Centered Solidarity finds in each typology a null curriculum, which hinders persons from fully appreciating and revering human personhood within contemporary religious educational practices. The concluding chapter discusses how, focusing on person-centered solidarity can enrich religious education in the church's ministries of being a worshipping community that teaches and serves humanity and the world.
Subject Area
Philosophy of religion|Theology|Education philosophy
Recommended Citation
Ezeatu, Mike S, "Person-Centered Solidarity: The Challenge of Religious Education Today" (2018). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI10844559.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI10844559
