Title: An Overview of Orthodox Christian Religious Education
Abstract: One of the great struggles that the North American Orthodox Christian Churches have had in the area of Christian religious education has been the rush and pressure to organise programs and prepare materials for educating the next generation. The discipline of Christian religious education is a relatively new phenomenon, emerging in the twentieth century, but not becoming more systematic until the last few decades. In traditionally ‘Orthodox countries,’ without the experience of Communist rule, such as Greece, Orthodox Christianity has been part of the public school curriculum without interruption since 1833 (Perselis, 1984). There it has the same relative position as mathematics or history. In the former Soviet-bloc nations, the teaching of Orthodox Christianity is returning to public education, with large investments from both Church and State. In Greece, the challenge is to develop meaningful programs within the context of public education. In the former Soviet union and Soviet republics, the challenge is the same, coupled with building the infrastructure—intellectual, practical, programmatic—for the return of religious education. Throughout the Orthodox world, issues of globalization, secularisation, modernity and post-modernity, and especially religious pluralism have made dealing with these matters more complex. The still relatively few professional scholars and researchers—five to ten globally—in Orthodox Christian religious education also have hampered responding to these immense challenges. In North America, especially the United States, Orthodox Christianity is a tiny minority, comprising less than one percent of the U.S. population, despite the claims and rhetoric of a much larger population (Hartford, 2003). In the United States, the environment with which I am most familiar, religion is not taught in public schools. Thus, Orthodox Christian religious education is a parochial, parishbased, program: the Sunday or Church school. In the United States, the pressure to
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 5
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