Strangers No Longer EDUCATING FOR A RELIGIOUSLY GLOBALISED WORLD Paul Faller Catholic Institute of Education, Johannesburg, South Africa Religious educators should strive to educate “in such a way that the religious „stranger‟ becomes „neighbour‟” (Boys 2002, p.14)
Strangers and Neighbours In our fast globalizing world, the neighbour is no longer necessarily the one who lives alongside us, a source of companionship and a support in difficult times. On the other hand, the stranger is in our midst. In former times we could romanticize the stranger at a safe distance, visiting him as a tourist attraction if we liked, but now we are called to enter into real communion with him as he takes up residence next door. Migration, for one reason or another, has brought the religious „other‟ into previously homogenous neighbourhoods, and both minarets and church steeples now share a common landscape. This realisation may have partly been behind the telling statement of Thomas Groome at a conference in Durban, South Africa in 2008 that “the future of the world depends on good religious education.” Religion is a thing of power and we need to direct this power to the flourishing of the Kingdom of God which, in other words, means the realisation of the human community as a single family. The school today is a microcosm of the multi-religious society and affords a concrete opportunity for realizing, at least partially, the ideal expressed above. The project is not without its challenges, but, at least in the Catholic school, which shares in the evangelizing mission of the Church, there is commitment to creating community based on the values of the gospel. Mary Boys reminds us of Dwayne Heubner‟s perception of education itself as a meeting of the self with “the new, the strange, the stranger” (Boys & Lee, 2006, p. 93). How, in the practice of religious education, might we make a significant contribution to the realisation of a religious community of difference? We shall consider three models of inter-religious learning, drawing on the writings of Chris Hermans, Mary Boys and others, with a view to proposing how this type of learning may be applied to the religious education classroom in the South African Catholic School. Before that, however, we need to review the aims of religious education briefly.
Reviewing the Aims of Religious Education Over the past century religious education has sought to resolve the tension implicit in its name: is it a religious activity or an educational one? The closer it has been identified with the religious community, the more the former perception has held sway, and a mono-religious model, with the aim of appropriating a particular religion
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