113 - Educating in Faith: Maps and Visions

Educating in Faith: Maps and Visions
By Mary C. Boys
San Francisco. Harper & Row, 1989. 230 pp. $21.95.

"What I have written in the first six chapters is a "lie." It's my rendering of what traversing the mountain entailed. Each reader needs to make his or her annotations."

Such are the true confessions of Mary Boys, Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Education at Boston College, in the final chapter of Educating in Faith. These disclosures point to the book's primary strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, Boys develops an easy-to-understand method of ordering various approaches some twentieth century (primarily North American) Christians have used to educate in faith. Boys suggests that evangelism, religious education, Christian education, and Catholic education are the four "classic expressions" of such education in faith. Further, each of these four expressions results

114 - Educating in Faith: Maps and Visions

in special ways of answering the two questions (with sub-points), "What does it mean to be religious?" and "What does it mean to educate in faith?" Boys speeds along the historical highways and cul-de-sacs of Catholic and Protestant educational models, figures, curriculums (and more!), with ingenuity and elan. The result is an historical tour de force unmatched by the previous similar works of Rood (1970), Burgess (1975), and Seymour and Miller (1982). Its special attention to feminist and Catholic perspectives insures the book's positive and lasting place in the field.

On the other hand, the relation of her own understandings of religious education and the history she has formed is methodologically unclear. Showing us how and why she came to her own conclusions in precise ways would help readers not only make "annotations" of her content, but critically create and articulate their own educational and historical methods as well. In this regard, the curious absence of sustained historical reference to the relation of Jewish education and the various educational possibilities of Christians is especially unfortunate (Can Christian approaches to education be discussed apart from trends in Jewish education?), and seems to decry her espoused understanding of humanization.

On balance, the book is a refreshing "lie." If W. S. Holt was correct that "history is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss," the field of religious education needs more of the sort of light Boys makes available to it.

Ronald H. Cram
Presbyterian School of Christian Education
Richmond, Va.