1. That many people stopped getting formal religious education when they were children or adolescents thus never acquiring an adult understanding of the faith tradition they were born into. Related issues include:
- parents ill-equipped to teach the faith to their children
- creating a culture of life-long religious learning
- adults at different life stages ask different religious questions
- infra-structure for adult religious learning
- adults who self-identify as spiritual but not religious
- how to educate adults from particularized contexts with diverse interests
- adult motivation to learn about a faith tradition
- educators may feel ill -prepared to respond to the questions adults ask
- institutional religion is structured to reach only those who show up at a particular place (e.g., church, mosque, synagogue, or temple) at a particular time
Thanks Eileen for getting this up and running. It sure is a much needed forum to look at issues that trouble and interest many of us. I realise just how underserved the conversation is when I see the list of topics you have generated. Many of them have never been broached in any meaningful or systematic way yet there is a deep yearning among adults genrally for things spiritual and religious, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to the contrary. My own interest is in number 3 or with those who are invested in a public spirituality and who hold no allegiance to churches, mosques or temples. How do they educate themselves, nurture their spirit or find meaning in everyday. I am not sure they are out there waiting for help. Many have found it and our task is to better understand and foster, I think, the informal and incidental ways they are learning. knowing more about that process would really interest me.
ReplyDeleteEileen, thanks for the blog. I look forward to reading and talking more.
Congratulations for getting this blog up and running!
ReplyDeleteNumber 3 is also my interest. I have long sought to develop a theological perspective on media that is neither reactive nor swallows it whole. Simultaneous to this comment I am viewing SURROGATE. The plot presents a society in which life is lived through surrogate robots without leaving home. Avatars in gaming are a limited version, but this extends to full-fledged robots fashioned as extensions of one's self.
For me, the Christian life is always personal but never private, always individual but simultaneously and inextricably communal. This is not to say that individuals do not have growth apart from the community but it is to say they do not reach full potential apart from community.
Hence I am always concerned about the use of diverse media in ways that nurture involvement in the local and larger community of faith. An example: broadcasting or cablecasting worship services "for the sake of the shut-ins" tends to isolate them from the community of faith. Better to take a video personally, sit down with the shut-in, view it together, stopping for the prayers to incorporate prayers of the shut-in or for the shut-in, and even (especially) bringing the Eucharist from the community's worship.
I look forward to further discussion.
Thanks for setting this up, Eileen,
ReplyDeleteI tend to be a bit more denominational in my beginning point - so the first issue listed interests me. At the same time, I wonder how we can be denominational without being parochial. How does good adult education/faith formation broaden people out beyond the denomination to see the challenge of bringing their faith into service for the transformation of the world. I guess because of that, I am less interested in getting people to come to things as I am in enriching things people come to with a rich sub-text. In that, I think I agree with what Leona said when she wrote: "Many have found it [spirituality] and our task is to better understand and foster, I think, the informal and incidental ways they are learning." I'm interested in that primarily(though not exclusivelly) within a particular denominational tradition.