Transcript Welcome to the 2004 conference

A Holistic Values Education
Emotionality, Rationality and Meaning
Prof. Roger Burggraeve
Faculty of Theology
K.U.Leuven
[email protected]
Friday
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
Introduction: Lines of approach
• Reflection on the relation between education and values, as
basis for religious education
• A three-dimensional holistic education based on
emotionality, rationality and meaning
• Illustrations from the world of 15-18 years old young people
(Western-Europe, Belgium)
• Attentive to emotionality also in the other dimensions of
rationality and meaning
Friday
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
I. Emotionality and reassuring Participation
1. Emotional embedment creates
the necessary environment for
education
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Values education doesn’t start cognitively,
but by creating a ‘milieu’ of conviviality
Emotional communion as intrinsic and
expressive value
A ‘covenantal’ and not a ‘contractual’
community
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
I. Emotionality and reassuring Participation
2. A ‘good enough mother’
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Risk of emotionally reductive
fusion, with loss of autonomy
Not a ‘perfect loving mother’ but
only a ‘good enough mother’
(Winnicott)
‘Go out’ as symbol for the
conquest
of
emotional
independency
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
II. Rationality and Ethical Wisdom
1. Reasonableness creates space for
communicative moral education
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Emotionality needs a supplement of
reasoning and discourse
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A ‘reasonable enough father’
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Confrontation with the ‘law of
reality’, which leads to practical
wisdom
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
II. Rationality and Ethical Wisdom
2. The other as eminent ‘law of reality’ (Levinas)
– Responsibility in the first person and the
moral emotions of solicitude, anxiety,
self-love
– The epiphany of the irreducible other
– Heteronomous affection by the
vulnerable face of the other and the
temptation to kill
– Ethical emotionality as bodily sensitivity:
being ‘touched’ presupposes ‘touchability’
Friday
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
II. Rationality and Ethical Wisdom
3. The paradoxical meaning of
prohibitions
– Our immediate, endless desire rejects negative
behavioural rules and limitations
– Traditional ethical wisdom expressed in
prohibitions (Ten Commandments)
– Positive moral emotions and attitudinal norms
as reverse side of prohibitions
– Prohibitions create space for creative freedom,
aesthetics and participative communities
Friday
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
III. Meaning Giving Integration and Religion
1. No holistic education without a perspective
of meaning
– A holistic values education deals with a
dimension of heteronomous, integrative
meaning
– Our approach is anchored in the
Christian tradition: “religion from within”
(Ricoeur)
– An associating and emotionally
involved, sensitive God
Friday
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
III. Meaning Giving Integration and Religion
2. Trans-ethical meaning and religious
education
– Religion is more than ethics: “God’s
(transnormative) ethics is our grace”
– Preceding divine love: transcendence as
transdescendence (cf. intergenerational love)
– The future of divine, fulfilling and restoring love:
transascendence (mercy as ‘ruchama’)
– Participation through (old and new) symbolic
and ritual forms, expressions and actions
Friday
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
Questions for the discussion groups
Ad I
1.
How does one create a milieu of reassuring participation
and conviviality, as the necessary ‘potential space’ for
education in general and for religious education in
particular?
2.
What are the chances, risks and challenges of this
emotional context surrounding (religious) education?
Friday
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
Questions for the discussion groups
Ad II
3. In what sense is it necessary to confront pupils with the ‘law of
reality’ through ‘rules’, or more specifically through ‘prohibitions’, as
expression of practical ethical wisdom?
4. How can this confrontation create the necessary environment for a
realistic moral education, as an integral part of religious education?
5. Do you agree that moral prohibitions create space for a dynamic,
expressive and tasteful freedom?
6. What are the emotional chances, risks and challenges of this kind of
moral education, based on ‘reasonableness’?
Friday
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
Questions for the discussion groups
Ad III
7. In what sense does a holistic education have to create an
adequate context for the dimension of ‘meaning’?
8. What do you understand by ‘meaning’ and where lie the
differences, tensions and connections between a purely
secular and a religious meaning?
9. What are the emotional chances and challenges of an
education, giving place to meaning in general, and tot
religious (Christian) meaning in particular?
Friday
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004
A Holistic Values Education
Emotionality, Rationality and Meaning
THANKS
[email protected]
www.theo.kuleuven.ac.be
,
Friday
EFTRE European Conference
Järvenpää 2004