271 - The Church in the Education of the Public: Refocusing the Task of Religious Education

The Church in the Education of the Public: Refocusing the Task of Religious Education
By Jack Seymor, Rober T. O'Gorman, and Charles R. Foster
Nashville, Abingdon, 1994. 156 pp. $10.95.

These three authors claim that religious education ought to be concerned with the public world, not just with the internal life of the church. It has, in their view, become instead almost entirely domesticated. Colleagues on the faculty of Scarritt College, a graduate school of religious education, they work together to provide a historical account of how religious education in America turned from a focus on the values and hopes of the common life of the public to parochial concerns of congregations and denominations.

Their historical narrative begins with Protestants of the mid-nineteentb century for whom the phrase "Christian educator" meant a person "who envisioned education as a primary strategy for shaping the national character and destiny according to Christian principles." This definition changed, they say, during the late nineteenth century when church education came to be limited "to the Sunday school, and the Sunday school to evangelization and training in Christian beliefs and morals." After tracing how the Roman Catholic Church struggled to educate its own "public" within a society dominated by Protestants, the authors turn to the attempt of the progressive educators of the early twentieth century to create a new public religious education. Here they find both failure in the task and clues for the future. In the final chapter, a sketch is provided of what is needed in a church education that takes seriously a "formative role in the education of the public."

The constructive proposals at the end are suggestive, but seem a bit meager in the light of the profound historical, sociological, and cultural difficulties identified in the historical chapters. Still, the task is an important one to take seriously, and this book brings it to our attention in a helpful way.

Craig Dykstra
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.