Abstract:
One of the most considerable changes in the contemporary European educational mentality is
a person’s disconnection from spiritual life. Christian formation has been replaced with
religious pluralism, in terms of syncretism influenced by global economic ideologies. Some
consequences are low resilience and low spiritual resistance to contemporary challenges,
associated with mental traumas or social behaviour deficits. Is it possible to restore the modern
person’s spiritual education? There is no evolution in the modern individual’s social life
without a horizon of spiritual expectation and fulfilment, different from the strictly material
one. Moreover, conscious education cannot deprive people of cultivating the spiritual part of
their consciousness from which the real values of existence are born. A series of arguments for
renewing the relation between school and the mature, Scripture-based Christian thinking in
the spirit of the European pedagogy are revealed by the factual historical analyses. Both
Eastern and Western European experiences have met after 13 years of evolving into two
antagonist geopolitical spheres. Their lessons in the education field could be an appropriate
model, academically applied at the cultural mentality and the European pedagogy level.
CONTRIBUTION : With this study, I want to highlight the historical and conceptual frameworks of
the Christian religious education meaning in the context of the rediscovery of Orthodox
Christianity by the international theological culture in post-communism. Orthodox
Christianity, forgotten in dictionaries and syntheses by the Western theological elite, brings in
a spiritualisation of education according to the Lord Jesus Christ’s Gospel and not of the
ideological cultural interests.
Description:
The author is participating as
the research associate of Dean
Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay, Faculty of
Theology and Religion,
University of Pretoria.
Special Collection: Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu, Romania, sub-edited by Daniel Buda (Lucian Blaga University) and Jerry Pillay (University of Pretoria).
