- Title
- The Theological Lacuna in Australian RE: Closing the Gap with aReconstructed Public Theology
- Creator
- Lovat, Terence
- Relation
- Public Theology: Perspectives on Religion and Education p. 161-172
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- The chapter will begin with a summary of the vexed history and split purposes of religious education (RE) as it has functioned in Australian religious and public school settings over the past century and a half. Such appraisal will be shown to reveal a paucity of theological underpinning and directionality in RE, whether designed for enfaithing, interfaith or merely general education purposes. In turn, such a paucity will be argued to render RE weakened against other school subjects by means of a lacuna in its disciplinary underpinnings. In effect, whatever its assigned purpose, this weakness has condemned it to the status of a largely disregarded subject of little appeal. The chapter will move to propose a Public Theology perspective as one highly suitable to redressing this weakness and providing RE with the theological infrastructure necessary to its role, be it as an agent of enfaithing, interfaith literacy or general education. In other words, Public Theology will be deemed to have pertinence as the foundational discipline for a RE that can function equally in the religious or public domains and so provide it with a sharpened sense of purpose and educational directionality across these domains. The chapter will justify this move against a range of prominent scholarship in theology and will utilize a key feature of Habermasian epistemology to illustrate its particular strength in enhancing student understanding of religion as an artefact of civilization and human knowing, a goal especially germane to the intentions of both RE and Public Theology.
- Subject
- religious education; public theology; Australian religious school; Australian public school
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1473957
- Identifier
- uon:49160
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781138612662
- Language
- eng
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