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ISREV 2012 - PLENARY PAPER ABSTRACTS

(As the programme is not yet available, the presenters are shown in alphabetical order)

Reinhold Boschki - “Culture of Remembrance”: Theoretical Framework for Religious and Value Education. A Christian and German approach

Zehavit Gross - Fostering Culture of Remembrance as a major challenge for Religious Education in diverse settings: A Jewish -Israeli perspective

Fedor Kozyrev - Taking Roots in Living Tradition: A Task for Post-Confessional RE

Hannele Niemi - Understanding history and remembrance in religious education in the light of critical pedagogy and existential analysis

Olga Schihalejev - Challenges in respecting history

Reinhold Boschki - “Culture of Remembrance”: Theoretical Framework for Religious and Value Education. A Christian and German approach

Paul Klee, the great artist and painter of the 20th century, created a wonderful piece of art called “Angelus Novus”. In the interpretation of the philosopher Walter Benjamin, this angel is the “the angel of history”: his face is turned toward the past where he sees catastrophe, suffering and death. His back is turned toward the future, the paradise, but his eyes are staring at the victims of historical events. In Benjamin’s view that is the position we should take.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, that turned my life in one long night seven times sealed. Never.” This statement, written ten years after the liberation of Auschwitz, became the life program of the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Like the “angel of history”, his work and message are turned toward the past but at the same time they focus on the present and future. In Wiesel’s life work we find basic elements of a concept of remembrance that are highly relevant for the religious and value education.

The paper aims to establish core issues of a Culture of Remembrance after the Shoah from a Christian perspective, in order to create a theoretical framework for religious and value education. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz speaks of an “anamnetic culture”, meaning a critical and self-reflected Culture of Remembrance that must be established within society and religion.

The core elements are:

(1) A Christian approach to the Culture of Remembrance must start with a hermeneutics of interruption, as Metz puts it. The Shoah is the ultimate interruption not only for the Jewish history but for civilization as a whole, as well as for Christianity. This interruption must trigger a rigorous self-examination concerning history and the roots of Anti-Semitism. The consequences in educational perspectives are educational programs against Anti-Semitism and racism, based on an intensive empirical analysis of Anti-Semitism today (e.g. the latest studies on youth and Anti-Semitism in Europe).

(2) Metz emphasises a second hermeneutical change: A “turn toward history” (David Tracy; John T. Pawlikowski) and a “turn toward concrete subjects” (Henning Luther; Ulrich Schwab) must get involved with the perspective of the suffering and the victims, meaning the biographies of men, women, and children in a concrete historical context. Religious Education theory must follow this approach in order to critically investigate the so-called “cultural memory studies” (Maurice Halbwachs; Pierre Nora; Jan Assmann; Harald Welzer). The consequences are e.g. educational work with testimonies of survivors (video documentation, diaries, oral history) in order to sensitize learners for historical suffering as well as for actual challenges. This part of the paper presents new empirical data on the historical consciousness and awareness of young people.

(3) Further key aspects of the Culture of Remembrance according to Wiesel’s work are: Negative hermeneutics of the Shoah – the concept of silence – mutual relationships of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders – remembrance and human rights – fighting Anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia. As a result, education facing the Shoah must always develop human rights programs in educational settings.

Prof. Reinhold Boschki, Catholic Theological Faculty, Bonn University, Germany.
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Zehavit Gross - Fostering Culture of Remembrance as a major challenge for Religious Education in diverse settings: A Jewish -Israeli perspective

The aim of this paper is to analyze the concept of Culture of Remembrance and to examine how it can be implemented and become a major challenge in Religious Education in diverse settings. The notion of a culture of remembrance is inspired by the UN definition of a culture of peace. The United Nations defined a culture of peace as a set of values, attitudes, modes of behaviour, and ways of life that reject violence and prevent conflicts by tackling their root causes in order to solve problems through dialogue and negotiation among individuals, groups and nations. A culture of remembrance is a hermeneutic process that involves continual adaptation, criticism and reflection.

Kluckhohn that while “culture consists of patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts, the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values”. Hosfstede perceives culture as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another”. This conception implies that culture is a multi-layered entity that is contextually bound. This remembrance has different facets and consists of contesting memories in the Focauldian tradition. Thus, the extent to which remembrance becomes visible stems from discourses of power/knowledge in which social agents and educators in particular must participate. Human beings are obliged to remember both the brutal aggression and the attempt to sanctify life even during abnormal and horrendous moments. This culture can be manifested and interpreted and presented differently in different contexts, but the point is to embrace the responsibility and commitment to enhance remembrance so that the mistakes of the past will be neither forgotten nor repeated. To develop a culture of remembrance, a society must actively strive for positive values, and promote knowledge, attitudes, and skills conducive to mutual understanding and to an active commitment to a cooperative and caring democratic society. The culture of remembrance requires vitality: the capacity to revive essential, generative elements of culture that have been lost in moments of destruction, bringing together the members of the group to renew their interest in, and adherence to, the central themes of their communal identity. Thus, a main goal of a vital culture of remembrance is not just to focus on the past, but rather to provide a vision for the present and the future. In my presentation I plan to analyze this concept in general and from a Jewish Israeli perspective and then explain how it can be implemented in Religious Education worldwide.

Dr. Zehavit Gross, School of Education, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
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Fedor Kozyrev - Taking Roots in Living Tradition: A Task for Post-Confessional RE

H. Nohl helped us to see the schoolteacher as a person with double responsibility, called to be the attorney of the child in the face of tradition and the attorney of tradition in the eyes of the child. While ‘standing in between’, the teacher hardly has a chance to reconcile the interests of the community to translate its tradition with interests of the child by merely balancing them or looking for the “golden middle”. Education looks rather for the full harmony between the two and for the opportunity of doing its best for both the child and the community not at the expense of one of them. This kind of harmony does not seem to be an unachievable goal. But since Rousseau in his famous “Emile” had recognized culture as a principle obstacle for the personal development of a child, the opposition of the two pedagogical ideals - teaching for autonomy and teaching for commitment - became the permanent focus of European pedagogical discourse and the main point of disagreements .

In RE the frontline between the two ideals may be roughly associated with the borderline between its confessional and non-confessional forms. What makes the basic difference between them is the issue of religious belonging. Accordingly, the convergence of the two forms evidently in progress during last decades may be described not only as a convergence of pedagogy and theology (K.E. Nipkow), but also as a growing irrelevance of the issue of formal religious belonging to the quality of educational process. From historical point of view, the basic question is whether we still choose between two educational paradigms with competing educational aims of teaching to be religious or teaching to understand religious people, or we overcame this opposition and found new synthesis. If the latter is true, the term post-confessional RE will be adequate to describe the new situation.

Instead of contrasting scientific objectivity to religious doctrines, the third paradigm should call for religious sensitivity, self-awareness and reflexivity on the side of all participants of educational process, believers and non-believers. The introduction of this new vision of RE is inseparable from two other questions. The first is why this search for reflexivity became so important for RE today. This question leads to consideration of RE from the perspective of general educational aims. The second is how to achieve the task of teaching to reflect on religion without compromising personal religious commitments. It will lead us further to consider the role of hermeneutics in postconfessional RE, and what does it mean to take roots in a living religious tradition and what kind of a quality of religious belonging is necessary for that.

Prof. Fedor Kozyrev, Russian Christian Academy for Humanities, St. Petersburg, Russia.
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Hannele Niemi - Understanding history and remembrance in religious education in the light of critical pedagogy and existential analysis

This presentation reflects on how critical pedagogy can contribute to religious education when teaching history and remembrance. One of the most famous representatives of critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire, has noted the importance of giving oppressed and suppressed people a voice and empowering them to participate in the construction of their own living conditions. Wilhem Carr together with Stephen Kemmis, whose roots are in Jurgen Habermas’ social theory, emphasize social practice and communicative action as being the main forces at play when we interpret our world. Our world is socially constructed. The most important concept in Habermas’s theory is ‘lifeworld’. Lifeworlds are the lived social worlds of participants, constructed across the three levels of (a) culture, (b) society and (c) the person. Each of these levels has a special task in the process of social and cultural reproduction and transformation. ”We can think of the lifeworld as represented by a culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns” (Habermas 1987).

How can religious education enable people to become aware of the history of different levels of structural components: culture, society and person? And how do they interact or how are they distorted when teaching history in religious education or remembrance? Is becoming critical too contradictory, even a burden, or is it empowering and enabling? In the presentation will be asked what it means in a young person’s life to become critical and how they can construe their identity in a world that is full of inequality, injustice and violence. The presentation sees the value of critical pedagogy in that it helps to understand how our life is socially constructed and how we interpret the world around us. It also assists in understanding how we are all part of these social constructions. Social theory based on Habermas’s communicative action also emphasizes the importance of social action through communication. It can lead to mutual understanding in our differentiated world. It opens ways to understanding differences and making collaborations with different people.

Understanding social constructions and their value basis is important for individuals’ identity formation. In the highly individualized Western postmodern world people need a sense of belonging and meaningfulness in their lives. In the framework of meaningfulness, many researchers closely related with existential analysis in psychotherapy or phenomenology in philosophy support the idea that a person should have values and aims in their life that go above and beyond their own welfare or happiness. Moral values and ethical perspectives in a person’s life brings also meaningfulness. Religious education can open new pathways for understanding ourselves and the diversity around us if it allows for discussions about our social practices and their history, promotes critical reflections on how we could promote justice, peace and good life together through new interpretations of our world and our own lives.

Prof. Hannele Niemi, Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, Helsinki University, Finland.
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Olga Schihalejev - Challenges in respecting history

My presentation will spring from Estonian context but I would like to proceed to more general and philosophical questions of what challenges are embodied in the notion of respecting history. The problem is studied in the crossroads of history of RE and philosophy.

By saying that we (should) respect history we usually mean that we are ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, we are aware of that and build our research and practices on the findings of the research and practices done before – either by using it, improving it or by debating with methodology and/or research findings.

But there are challenges in keeping the same logic in the situation where the tradition of teaching and study about RE was broken by totalitarian regime for almost half of the century. Two generations had access only to atheistic knowledge about religion; the possibilities to practice religion life were restricted. Is it possible and necessary to respect such a history?

In my presentation I will give an overview of the Estonian case of history of religious education - more precisely about the turbulent last hundred years. The period started with the first referendum in independent Estonia and a really innovative approach to RE worked out by pioneers of Estonian ecumenical RE - Johan Kõpp, the first Estonian professor in the field of practical theology and the first Estonian professor of pedagogy as well as theologian, Peeter Põld.

After that I will proceed to the soviet period and bring examples of atheistic education conducted during this period. Lastly I will talk about the recent developments in the field of RE in Estonia under the leadership of Dr Pille Valk.

The case of Estonia works as a case study or game of thought about more generalised philosophical challenges that may arise from a call to respect history.

Dr. Olga Schihalejev, Faculty of Theology, Tartu University, Estonia.
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