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Religious Education Development: Images for the Future
By Gabriel Moran
Minneapolis, Winston Press, 1983. 204 pp. $9.95.

One of the major distinctions made at the World Council of Churches Vancouver meeting was between an ecumenism which meant community between churches and one directed to communion among the world's peoples. In this, his twelfth and perhaps finest book, Gabriel Moran offers a meaning for religious education that can provide a basis for education religiously appropriate for that global context.

The work has three major components: an exploration of the meaning of development; a commentary, critique, and elaboration of those developmental theories currently most influential in religious education; and the proposal of a "grammar" of both religion and education which forms the basis of a religious education understood as lifelong.

Moran raises the question early on of the presence of the term "development" in two arenas of life, economics and psychology. He explores the meanings as they appear in these two fields, and comments on the peculiar and puzzling circumstance which apparently sees little or no relationship between the two. He looks with care at the imagery of development especially when it connotes linear, upward, straight, logical movement toward greater and greater growth. He offers illuminating critique of such imagery, often from feminist and aesthetic perspectives, as well as from religious and mystical traditions throughout the world.

Secondly, Moran examines Erikson, Piaget, Kohlberg, and Fowler as these embody and limit the approach to development most present in today's educational work. He praises the relational aspects of both Erikson and Piaget, at the same time offering the double observation:

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"Anyone whose distinctive approach is Piagetian cannot incorporate Eriksonian material. And anyone who starts with an Eriksonian pattern can incorporate Piaget only in minor ways." At the same time, he elaborates on the former while noting subsequent work on adult development (Levinson, Vaillant, Sheehy, and perhaps more importantly, Marjorie Fiske Lowenthal), which is complementary to Eriksonian approaches. He affirms the genuine genius of Piaget's contribution, while pointing out that his "cognitive" development actually describes only how the human mind comes to the capacities to abstract and to reason. He suggests educators bring a narrowness of vision to religious life if they similarly limit the understanding of knowledge and cognition.

His analysis of Lawrence Kohlberg's work is restrained yet devastating. Not only does he continually reveal the disembodied attitude to morality conveyed by a movement toward an abstract point where a principle of justice determines moral decision, he contrasts this with a movement where issues of moral responsibility are always set in the context of the questions: "To whom, with what, and for what purpose am I responsible?" He then develops a morality learned through the centuries, one arising from an ethic of virtue/care/character/community which "does not choose the individual over the social or the particular over the universal." He concludes with a brilliant and moving revisioning of the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. Finally, he provides a gentle and probing introduction to the work of James Fowler, noting the as yet incomplete synthesis of Piaget and Erikson in Fowler's work, as well as the ambiguities and complexities of the central category of "faith" as defined in that work.

Drawing on what is best in all of these, he then offers a "grammar" for the development of religion, a three-stage movement related to, yet broader and more communal than the Fowler scheme. One is (a) simply religious as a child; moves to (b) acquiring a religion (our people's belief-and then disbelief); and is lastly (c) religiously Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, a phrase intended to capture the attitude and experience where one does not so much "have" a religion as one is religious in a particular way. He follows this with a complementary grammar for educational development, where one is educated through the interplay of community, work, leisure, and schooling. And then, in summation, he proposes three stages for religious education: (a) Simply Religious Education, with the two moments of the physical and the visional/mystical; (b) Christian (Jewish, Muslim) Education, with the two moments of narrative and systematic; and (c) Religiously Christian (Jewish, Muslim) Education, with the two moments of Journeying/ Inquiry and Centering. Essential to both the "grammars" and to the stages, however, is an imagery of interdependence, of mutuality, of integration of opposites, and of recurring return to source and to people.

My own prose does not do justice to this always absorbing, original

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and creative work. Moran has never been clearer, and paradoxically, more poetic. The power of the work-and it is powerful-is in its writing, clean and beautifully edited; in its scholarship, thoughtful and thorough; but most of all in its concreteness, its vision and its language. Investigating what exists and what has been, he incorporates these into an education reverent and responsible to all communities, including one's own, while showing the way to educate toward greater communion. Pastors, teachers, professors, workers, and conternplatives will be moved and inspired by this major volume. It is a work I can only hope will receive the wide readership, understanding, and implementation it richly deserves.

Maria Harris
Andover Newton Theological School
Newton Centre, Massachusetts