INTRODICTION
Educational institutions play a crucial role in building and enhancing the immunity and resilience of every society in confronting external and internal voices and forces which oppose pluralism and advocate for exclusion and violence.
Education has a profound effect on individual development and can promote or prevent prejudice and conversely promote or prevent tolerance.
Lessons learned in the classroom stay with us as we continue to grow, and our learning does not stop once we have left the classroom.
1.0 ANGLE COMPONENTS OF RESEARCH
In this research we are going to address ourselves in the field of pedagogy as a scientific discipline of understanding interreligious dialogue.
Much of the reflections and approach will be based on the course work and paradigm shifts created during the course work, conferences attended and above all exploring into the thought and sojourner of professor Ambrogio Bongiovanni perspective towards the culture of dialogue, the significant role of education.
1.1 PEDAGOGY OF INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE
Thus, educators can take on a central role in promoting cultural and religious diversity.
This involves pedagogical features, (content learning, structural interaction, facilitative leadership) communication processes (dialogical communication, critical communication) and psychological processes (openness, identity engagement and positivity across differences) all work together to achieve the desired outcomes of intergroup understanding, relationships, and collaboration.
This gives us a clear picture where pedagogy of interreligious belongs as far as dialogue among religions can be approached.
The church document Gaudium et Spes #82 states:
But we should not let false hope deceive us. For unless enmities and hatred are put away and firm, honest agreements concerning world peace are reached in the future, humanity, which already is in the middle of a grave crisis, even though it is endowed with remarkable knowledge, will perhaps be brought to that dismal hour in which it will experience no peace other than the dreadful peace of death.
But, while we say this, the Church of Christ, present in the midst of the anxiety of this age, does not cease to hope most firmly. She intends to propose to our age over and over again, in season and out of season, this apostolic message: "Behold, now is the acceptable time for a change of heart; behold! now is the day of salvation."
No world peace without peace among religions, no peace among religions without dialogue between religious and dialogue between religions with accurate knowledge of one another.
Interreligious conflicts are as old as the existence of religion as that of human history, older than many today’s major world religions.
Religion today, has become a dividing issue than uniting factor in our communities, schools, use of religious symbols, and the nation at large.
Today, the symbol of the cross has become so controversial image in the educational institutions and political intolerance in secularized states.
As missionary agents we are called to be part of the pedagogical interreligious formation team to advocate for harmony with an interreligious understanding and prevent future misunderstandings.
Pedagogy of interreligious dialogue is a discipline of paradigm shifts and system thinking in religious realms in the pluralistic global village.
This will mean a call to the need of understanding what are the difficulties we are handling in the first place.
All this is towards improving the level of multicultural understanding, engagement and sensitivity on the part of the missionary agents.
The implications of this research include the need for further advance theoretical discourse related to Christian involvement and identity, the importance of expanding educational pedagogy seeking to promote awareness and understanding of these issues and obligations for interreligious practitioners, faculty and other higher education professionals to be more sensitive to the experiences of missionary agents with the others of different religions.
Today, humanity is greatly endangered and confronted with great challenges that come with radical changes with little attention or few answers to the many questions confronting modern man and woman. (terrorism, religious intolerance, religious hate, migrations, nuclear threats). Pedagogy of interreligious dialogue is part of this big tank thinking more so in educating educators to become great prophetic witnesses and professionals in their global approach to modern problems and challenges affecting the globe.
Modern technological challenges deserve responses which are also sound scientifically grounded, as Michel de Montaigne would state “e meglio una testa ben fatta che una testa piena.”
Meaning better to learn the system of thinking and knowledgeable that being full of notions which doesn’t meaning but empty hot words.
The entire operation at times Morin says is a very complicated and with global consequences. This will call for a sober mind in handling the issues and this is the domain of education and pedagogy.
Pedagogy of religious dialogue is the way forward of understanding what it means to know the other as a colleague, friend and brother not as an enemy but a person if interest to relate with and know what that other world means or contains.
This can only be done through solidarity, freely and in just gesture founded on dialogue of life. This will call for a paradigm shift in anthropological attitude of approach to man’s challenges of dialogue.
This will call for creativity and mind openness without any prejudice and fear.
Pedagogy of interreligious dialogue is one of the scientific research and educational instrument to launch us towards open minded discussions, conversion, change of attitude, free space in open dialogue. Dialogue is indispensable as far as interreligious dialogue is concerned.
Man has turned to be violent, intolerant and suicidal in his actions. The challenge of terrorism, religious hatred and martyrdom, migration flow of resources and manpower which has destabilized the continental peace and cultures.
One is either contaminated/fertilized in the process of interacting with the other.
Pedagogy in interreligious dialogue is a missiological response and approach towards current issues facing man and woman today.
We are called to understand the other’s point of view, by being good listeners, by studying together our religious experiences and coming to terms with what we used to fear to address.
We walk the talk, breathe the talk and become the talk of pedagogical interreligious dialogue.
We have to relearn the language we use, the language should be acceptable, confrontations are bound to happen, but we should be aware and conscience in the way we handle issues in confrontation.
Pedagogy in interreligious dialogue is not about controlling others but encountering others. How do we live our Christian commitment towards changing the world we live it, to make it better than we found it, socially and politically? This calls for new angle components.
Formation is about living in the context. (seminary, college, university, public institutions). Things must be done well and professionally.
In pedagogical search for interdisciplinary instruments is about sharing our religious experiences within interreligious dialogue, where we are encouraged as missionary agents to critically analyse religious identity and what we attach to them.
Daily we confront issues of intolerance, religious hatred, discriminations of all types, oppression and inequality, that needs professional handling and approach on how to be authentic prophetic witnessing.
We are living in a boiling pot of religious challenges and the name of God is used to justify the evils.
1.3 PEDAGOGICAL FORMATION AND APPROACH
Pedagogy is a Greek word that has an origin of a slave who was to take the child of the master to school, an accompaniment, a guide.
This gives us a picture what we are researching on. An education without pedagogy is an ideology without direction.
The reality of pedagogy of religious dialogue means that we have to be pedagogically sound, relevant and effective in all that we do.
The church has been preoccupied with education of her children, more so in her approach on missioning and evangelization. A university is a place of preparing and crediting professionals: clergy men, religious sisters, lawyers, medical doctors, scientist, politicians, business leaders, teachers and many other paraprofessionals.
Quality education on all levels becomes a necessity for any person or nation that doesn’t want to live on the fringes of social and economic progress.
Education by its very nature is a great value for humans, cherished throughout human history. As St. Augustine could state “Our words speak but our examples cry out.”
Beyond knowledge, education should lead to wisdom which is the foundation of all human good and happiness.
As a missionary agent this is what formation into pedagogy has for us, learning more about oneself and the others, without the purpose of desire to uncover the truth or determine who is right and who is wrong about the spiritual realm.
This can be increased through education that can create peacefulness in individuals, communities and societies.
This will foster changes that will make the world a better place to live and co-existence, eliminating prejudice, being tolerant, being defenders of human rights, protectors of the environment against destruction and contamination.
Today many peace education programmes around the world, directly address religious conflicts, discrimination and oppression as an issue needing resolutions before a peaceful society can be created.
Cultural violence is common due to lack of personal thought and formation in handling issues. These issues sometimes get worked up, over boil and renders those in conflict feel irrelevant, with pedagogical formation, is the beginning of reconciling everything back to Christ.
Dialogue should be meant and encouraged to finding truth, interior transparency. A critical observation of other people’s opinion, this can be well articulated in the pedagogical, educative approach which we could put or call educative and pedagogical dialects.
Dialogue like research should be at the heart of truth, to know the self and the culture of where one wants to be.
Pedagogy of interreligious is about being educated on how to critic, be creative and above all being innovative.
We all in one way or another in dialogue with ourselves or with others. The challenge is not to fall in excesses of doing things literally but professionally.
Pedagogical-educative didactics has to put the learner in crisis so as to provoke answers in the student to start thinking about certain things appropriately, more so how things ought to e interpreted in moments that are opportune.
In this context we would like to have a paradigm shift to pedagogy of interreligious dialogue where we have to create a blue print of creating a society and environment that produces results and if there are no results, yet we still can get back to the drawing board or back for refresher course for updates.
Pedagogy of interreligious dialogue could be called a school of dialogue, where you naturally enter into dialectical approaches of dialogue, in form and spirit with an ending interrogation of what is before one’s reality.
Its all about connectivity of the self, with God, the ultimate Truth in the sense of our humanness. One can’t close himself or herself in that soliloquy, lest one becomes an island, which even that is impossible, its about openness to enter a new reality, a new life, a new thought and a new horizon. We become true humanity, new life syntonised to a frequency of better listening.
This is a thought Martin Buber (1879-1915) which he builds on I-Thou with the very wide open-ended world to rediscover.
As a man encounters another man, something is lost and gained in the process, and never remains the same.
That is what relationship is all about, different spirits are enriched and glorified.
1.4 THE CULTURE OF DIALOGUE
Towards the culture of dialogue has its foundation in education. It’s the task for all Christians and it can’t be left only to the good intentions and fortunate insights of some precursors and so-called experts .
Ambrogio emphasises that many obstacles, prejudices and many other forms of resistance that have been forced down to people simply impoverish and renders the situation worse.
This has to reinvent itself into a work in progress only in the culture of dialogue.
This calls for all to learn to accept others and their different ways of living, thinking and speaking, as clearly stipulated in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium #250
An attitude of openness in truth and in love must characterize the dialogue with the followers of non-Christian religions, in spite of various obstacles and difficulties, especially forms of fundamentalism on both sides. Interreligious dialogue is a necessary condition for peace in the world, and so it is a duty for Christians as well as other religious communities.
This dialogue is in first place a conversation about human existence or simply, as the bishops of India have put it, a matter of “being open to them, sharing their joys and sorrows”.[194] In this way we learn to accept others and their different ways of living, thinking and speaking.
We can then join one another in taking up the duty of serving justice and peace, which should become a basic principle of all our exchanges.
A dialogue which seeks social peace and justice is in itself, beyond all merely practical considerations, an ethical commitment which brings about a new social situation.
Efforts made in dealing with a specific theme can become a process in which, by mutual listening, both parts can be purified and enriched.
These efforts, therefore, can also express love for truth.
We ought to join each other in the duty of serving justice and peace, basic principles of dialogue of life.
This has to lead us to a systematic formation, rethinking theological formation in view of the church’s missionary transformation and the church has to go forth and in clear terms and conditions.
This is not about Transmitting knowledge about the other religions, overcoming prejudice and favouring understanding that is sound.
This will call for religious and the clergy to put much emphasis and importance of dialogue more so that of pedagogy of interreligious dialogue to become a core course in formation houses and major seminary curriculum.
The educational system should incorporate intercultural formation in the students to open their world view of the current realties of what is happening around them.
The education should be open to engage and reconstruction of definition of crisis and above all a starting point of starting to get involved in dialogue of life.
This should lead to fertilization to learn to see what we did not see before, adequate preparation for listening and openness, together with certain theological and cultural preparation that will allow awareness of cultural and religious differences to grow and prepare the terrain on which the dialogue will be built. Formative process goes beyond a mere encounter between cultures.
Theology should be very grounded in such a way that the issues of interreligious dialogue have to take centre stage in their formation processes.
This can be discovered in the post-synodal document Ecclesia in Asia when Ambrogio cites #31
Only those with a mature and convinced Christian faith are qualified in genuine interreligious dialogue.
Only Christians who are deeply immersed in the mystery of Christ and who are happy in their faith community can without undue risk and with hope of positive fruit engage in interreligious dialogue.
Ambrogio places his emphasis on theological formation in its contextualization of the truths of faith and hermeneutic of the contexts from which the “the signs of transcendence” and ontological need for salvation” can emerge .
CONCLUSION
Pedagogy of interreligious dialogue is a serious investment that has to be jealously guided, and this can only be done only once the church start subjecting herself, to quality assessment and evaluation tools.
The students and mission agents should have a system thinking that is sound and value based and culturally open ended.
All those getting involved in mission mandate and vision sight should be people who can think globally but act locally.
The pedagogy is interreligious dialogue doesn’t claim to know everything but is open to new insights and discoveries, living some space for the holy Spirit. Once the interrelationship is well polished out, there should be also some space of the Holy Spirit, just in case the what if situation arises.
This calls for serious theological formation that is very relevant, effective and efficient.
The people can know whether a missionary is very academic, down to earth or a holy man of God.
As in the gospel of John he concludes his sequela of stain the “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (Jn 13:35.)”
On the basis of the Second Vatican Council’s teaching, formation will have to aim at forming persons who are ready to be honest and critical of their own past and others. Hans Kung says, ‘There is no peace in the world without peace among religions, and there is no dialogue among the religions without accurate reciprocal knowledge.’
A person involved in dialogue should not imagine himself in another’s place or put himself in another’s shoes, but rather look for elements, symbolic forms through which, in each context, the person understand themselves.
Ambrogio critically delves into this issue by emphasizing that It’s important to understand how others describe their own tradition rather than just reading a description from texts or hearing it from professors within the Christian tradition, for formation should take place even when and where one enters into new horizons and above all the encounter which reveals new aspects of reality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BONGIOVANNI, A., Towards the Culture of Dialogue, the Significant Role of Education, in Mission Makes the Church, 1916-October 31-2016, Pontifical Missionary Union, (ed) Fabrizio Meroni, Aracne editrice Rome 2017, 163-194.
MANCHINI, D., Class notes on Globalization and Ethics in the Era of Complexity, LUMSA (DEF) aggiornamento 12 febbraio Roma 2018.
FLORES, G, D’Arcais., in Nuovo Dizionario di Pedagogia, a cura di Guiseppe Flores d’Arcais edizioni Paoline, Roma 1982, pp. 326-335
Harris, I.M. (2004).“Peace education theory. Journal of Peace Education”, 1(1),5–20., 29/05/2018
, 29/05/2018
KUNG, H., Christianity and the World Religions: Paths of Dialogue with Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, Fount Paperbacks, London 1987.
N, SORENSEN, - K.E. MAXWELL., “Taking a hands on” Approach to Diversity in Higher Education: A Critical Dialogical Model for Effective Intergroup Interaction, in Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 9(1),2009 3-35
Educational institutions play a crucial role in building and enhancing the immunity and resilience of every society in confronting external and internal voices and forces which oppose pluralism and advocate for exclusion and violence.
Education has a profound effect on individual development and can promote or prevent prejudice and conversely promote or prevent tolerance.
Lessons learned in the classroom stay with us as we continue to grow, and our learning does not stop once we have left the classroom.
1.0 ANGLE COMPONENTS OF RESEARCH
In this research we are going to address ourselves in the field of pedagogy as a scientific discipline of understanding interreligious dialogue.
Much of the reflections and approach will be based on the course work and paradigm shifts created during the course work, conferences attended and above all exploring into the thought and sojourner of professor Ambrogio Bongiovanni perspective towards the culture of dialogue, the significant role of education.
1.1 PEDAGOGY OF INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE
Thus, educators can take on a central role in promoting cultural and religious diversity.
This involves pedagogical features, (content learning, structural interaction, facilitative leadership) communication processes (dialogical communication, critical communication) and psychological processes (openness, identity engagement and positivity across differences) all work together to achieve the desired outcomes of intergroup understanding, relationships, and collaboration.
This gives us a clear picture where pedagogy of interreligious belongs as far as dialogue among religions can be approached.
The church document Gaudium et Spes #82 states:
But we should not let false hope deceive us. For unless enmities and hatred are put away and firm, honest agreements concerning world peace are reached in the future, humanity, which already is in the middle of a grave crisis, even though it is endowed with remarkable knowledge, will perhaps be brought to that dismal hour in which it will experience no peace other than the dreadful peace of death.
But, while we say this, the Church of Christ, present in the midst of the anxiety of this age, does not cease to hope most firmly. She intends to propose to our age over and over again, in season and out of season, this apostolic message: "Behold, now is the acceptable time for a change of heart; behold! now is the day of salvation."
No world peace without peace among religions, no peace among religions without dialogue between religious and dialogue between religions with accurate knowledge of one another.
Interreligious conflicts are as old as the existence of religion as that of human history, older than many today’s major world religions.
Religion today, has become a dividing issue than uniting factor in our communities, schools, use of religious symbols, and the nation at large.
Today, the symbol of the cross has become so controversial image in the educational institutions and political intolerance in secularized states.
As missionary agents we are called to be part of the pedagogical interreligious formation team to advocate for harmony with an interreligious understanding and prevent future misunderstandings.
Pedagogy of interreligious dialogue is a discipline of paradigm shifts and system thinking in religious realms in the pluralistic global village.
This will mean a call to the need of understanding what are the difficulties we are handling in the first place.
All this is towards improving the level of multicultural understanding, engagement and sensitivity on the part of the missionary agents.
The implications of this research include the need for further advance theoretical discourse related to Christian involvement and identity, the importance of expanding educational pedagogy seeking to promote awareness and understanding of these issues and obligations for interreligious practitioners, faculty and other higher education professionals to be more sensitive to the experiences of missionary agents with the others of different religions.
Today, humanity is greatly endangered and confronted with great challenges that come with radical changes with little attention or few answers to the many questions confronting modern man and woman. (terrorism, religious intolerance, religious hate, migrations, nuclear threats). Pedagogy of interreligious dialogue is part of this big tank thinking more so in educating educators to become great prophetic witnesses and professionals in their global approach to modern problems and challenges affecting the globe.
Modern technological challenges deserve responses which are also sound scientifically grounded, as Michel de Montaigne would state “e meglio una testa ben fatta che una testa piena.”
Meaning better to learn the system of thinking and knowledgeable that being full of notions which doesn’t meaning but empty hot words.
The entire operation at times Morin says is a very complicated and with global consequences. This will call for a sober mind in handling the issues and this is the domain of education and pedagogy.
Pedagogy of religious dialogue is the way forward of understanding what it means to know the other as a colleague, friend and brother not as an enemy but a person if interest to relate with and know what that other world means or contains.
This can only be done through solidarity, freely and in just gesture founded on dialogue of life. This will call for a paradigm shift in anthropological attitude of approach to man’s challenges of dialogue.
This will call for creativity and mind openness without any prejudice and fear.
Pedagogy of interreligious dialogue is one of the scientific research and educational instrument to launch us towards open minded discussions, conversion, change of attitude, free space in open dialogue. Dialogue is indispensable as far as interreligious dialogue is concerned.
Man has turned to be violent, intolerant and suicidal in his actions. The challenge of terrorism, religious hatred and martyrdom, migration flow of resources and manpower which has destabilized the continental peace and cultures.
One is either contaminated/fertilized in the process of interacting with the other.
Pedagogy in interreligious dialogue is a missiological response and approach towards current issues facing man and woman today.
We are called to understand the other’s point of view, by being good listeners, by studying together our religious experiences and coming to terms with what we used to fear to address.
We walk the talk, breathe the talk and become the talk of pedagogical interreligious dialogue.
We have to relearn the language we use, the language should be acceptable, confrontations are bound to happen, but we should be aware and conscience in the way we handle issues in confrontation.
Pedagogy in interreligious dialogue is not about controlling others but encountering others. How do we live our Christian commitment towards changing the world we live it, to make it better than we found it, socially and politically? This calls for new angle components.
Formation is about living in the context. (seminary, college, university, public institutions). Things must be done well and professionally.
In pedagogical search for interdisciplinary instruments is about sharing our religious experiences within interreligious dialogue, where we are encouraged as missionary agents to critically analyse religious identity and what we attach to them.
Daily we confront issues of intolerance, religious hatred, discriminations of all types, oppression and inequality, that needs professional handling and approach on how to be authentic prophetic witnessing.
We are living in a boiling pot of religious challenges and the name of God is used to justify the evils.
1.3 PEDAGOGICAL FORMATION AND APPROACH
Pedagogy is a Greek word that has an origin of a slave who was to take the child of the master to school, an accompaniment, a guide.
This gives us a picture what we are researching on. An education without pedagogy is an ideology without direction.
The reality of pedagogy of religious dialogue means that we have to be pedagogically sound, relevant and effective in all that we do.
The church has been preoccupied with education of her children, more so in her approach on missioning and evangelization. A university is a place of preparing and crediting professionals: clergy men, religious sisters, lawyers, medical doctors, scientist, politicians, business leaders, teachers and many other paraprofessionals.
Quality education on all levels becomes a necessity for any person or nation that doesn’t want to live on the fringes of social and economic progress.
Education by its very nature is a great value for humans, cherished throughout human history. As St. Augustine could state “Our words speak but our examples cry out.”
Beyond knowledge, education should lead to wisdom which is the foundation of all human good and happiness.
As a missionary agent this is what formation into pedagogy has for us, learning more about oneself and the others, without the purpose of desire to uncover the truth or determine who is right and who is wrong about the spiritual realm.
This can be increased through education that can create peacefulness in individuals, communities and societies.
This will foster changes that will make the world a better place to live and co-existence, eliminating prejudice, being tolerant, being defenders of human rights, protectors of the environment against destruction and contamination.
Today many peace education programmes around the world, directly address religious conflicts, discrimination and oppression as an issue needing resolutions before a peaceful society can be created.
Cultural violence is common due to lack of personal thought and formation in handling issues. These issues sometimes get worked up, over boil and renders those in conflict feel irrelevant, with pedagogical formation, is the beginning of reconciling everything back to Christ.
Dialogue should be meant and encouraged to finding truth, interior transparency. A critical observation of other people’s opinion, this can be well articulated in the pedagogical, educative approach which we could put or call educative and pedagogical dialects.
Dialogue like research should be at the heart of truth, to know the self and the culture of where one wants to be.
Pedagogy of interreligious is about being educated on how to critic, be creative and above all being innovative.
We all in one way or another in dialogue with ourselves or with others. The challenge is not to fall in excesses of doing things literally but professionally.
Pedagogical-educative didactics has to put the learner in crisis so as to provoke answers in the student to start thinking about certain things appropriately, more so how things ought to e interpreted in moments that are opportune.
In this context we would like to have a paradigm shift to pedagogy of interreligious dialogue where we have to create a blue print of creating a society and environment that produces results and if there are no results, yet we still can get back to the drawing board or back for refresher course for updates.
Pedagogy of interreligious dialogue could be called a school of dialogue, where you naturally enter into dialectical approaches of dialogue, in form and spirit with an ending interrogation of what is before one’s reality.
Its all about connectivity of the self, with God, the ultimate Truth in the sense of our humanness. One can’t close himself or herself in that soliloquy, lest one becomes an island, which even that is impossible, its about openness to enter a new reality, a new life, a new thought and a new horizon. We become true humanity, new life syntonised to a frequency of better listening.
This is a thought Martin Buber (1879-1915) which he builds on I-Thou with the very wide open-ended world to rediscover.
As a man encounters another man, something is lost and gained in the process, and never remains the same.
That is what relationship is all about, different spirits are enriched and glorified.
1.4 THE CULTURE OF DIALOGUE
Towards the culture of dialogue has its foundation in education. It’s the task for all Christians and it can’t be left only to the good intentions and fortunate insights of some precursors and so-called experts .
Ambrogio emphasises that many obstacles, prejudices and many other forms of resistance that have been forced down to people simply impoverish and renders the situation worse.
This has to reinvent itself into a work in progress only in the culture of dialogue.
This calls for all to learn to accept others and their different ways of living, thinking and speaking, as clearly stipulated in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium #250
An attitude of openness in truth and in love must characterize the dialogue with the followers of non-Christian religions, in spite of various obstacles and difficulties, especially forms of fundamentalism on both sides. Interreligious dialogue is a necessary condition for peace in the world, and so it is a duty for Christians as well as other religious communities.
This dialogue is in first place a conversation about human existence or simply, as the bishops of India have put it, a matter of “being open to them, sharing their joys and sorrows”.[194] In this way we learn to accept others and their different ways of living, thinking and speaking.
We can then join one another in taking up the duty of serving justice and peace, which should become a basic principle of all our exchanges.
A dialogue which seeks social peace and justice is in itself, beyond all merely practical considerations, an ethical commitment which brings about a new social situation.
Efforts made in dealing with a specific theme can become a process in which, by mutual listening, both parts can be purified and enriched.
These efforts, therefore, can also express love for truth.
We ought to join each other in the duty of serving justice and peace, basic principles of dialogue of life.
This has to lead us to a systematic formation, rethinking theological formation in view of the church’s missionary transformation and the church has to go forth and in clear terms and conditions.
This is not about Transmitting knowledge about the other religions, overcoming prejudice and favouring understanding that is sound.
This will call for religious and the clergy to put much emphasis and importance of dialogue more so that of pedagogy of interreligious dialogue to become a core course in formation houses and major seminary curriculum.
The educational system should incorporate intercultural formation in the students to open their world view of the current realties of what is happening around them.
The education should be open to engage and reconstruction of definition of crisis and above all a starting point of starting to get involved in dialogue of life.
This should lead to fertilization to learn to see what we did not see before, adequate preparation for listening and openness, together with certain theological and cultural preparation that will allow awareness of cultural and religious differences to grow and prepare the terrain on which the dialogue will be built. Formative process goes beyond a mere encounter between cultures.
Theology should be very grounded in such a way that the issues of interreligious dialogue have to take centre stage in their formation processes.
This can be discovered in the post-synodal document Ecclesia in Asia when Ambrogio cites #31
Only those with a mature and convinced Christian faith are qualified in genuine interreligious dialogue.
Only Christians who are deeply immersed in the mystery of Christ and who are happy in their faith community can without undue risk and with hope of positive fruit engage in interreligious dialogue.
Ambrogio places his emphasis on theological formation in its contextualization of the truths of faith and hermeneutic of the contexts from which the “the signs of transcendence” and ontological need for salvation” can emerge .
CONCLUSION
Pedagogy of interreligious dialogue is a serious investment that has to be jealously guided, and this can only be done only once the church start subjecting herself, to quality assessment and evaluation tools.
The students and mission agents should have a system thinking that is sound and value based and culturally open ended.
All those getting involved in mission mandate and vision sight should be people who can think globally but act locally.
The pedagogy is interreligious dialogue doesn’t claim to know everything but is open to new insights and discoveries, living some space for the holy Spirit. Once the interrelationship is well polished out, there should be also some space of the Holy Spirit, just in case the what if situation arises.
This calls for serious theological formation that is very relevant, effective and efficient.
The people can know whether a missionary is very academic, down to earth or a holy man of God.
As in the gospel of John he concludes his sequela of stain the “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (Jn 13:35.)”
On the basis of the Second Vatican Council’s teaching, formation will have to aim at forming persons who are ready to be honest and critical of their own past and others. Hans Kung says, ‘There is no peace in the world without peace among religions, and there is no dialogue among the religions without accurate reciprocal knowledge.’
A person involved in dialogue should not imagine himself in another’s place or put himself in another’s shoes, but rather look for elements, symbolic forms through which, in each context, the person understand themselves.
Ambrogio critically delves into this issue by emphasizing that It’s important to understand how others describe their own tradition rather than just reading a description from texts or hearing it from professors within the Christian tradition, for formation should take place even when and where one enters into new horizons and above all the encounter which reveals new aspects of reality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BONGIOVANNI, A., Towards the Culture of Dialogue, the Significant Role of Education, in Mission Makes the Church, 1916-October 31-2016, Pontifical Missionary Union, (ed) Fabrizio Meroni, Aracne editrice Rome 2017, 163-194.
MANCHINI, D., Class notes on Globalization and Ethics in the Era of Complexity, LUMSA (DEF) aggiornamento 12 febbraio Roma 2018.
FLORES, G, D’Arcais., in Nuovo Dizionario di Pedagogia, a cura di Guiseppe Flores d’Arcais edizioni Paoline, Roma 1982, pp. 326-335
Harris, I.M. (2004).“Peace education theory. Journal of Peace Education”, 1(1),5–20.
KUNG, H., Christianity and the World Religions: Paths of Dialogue with Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, Fount Paperbacks, London 1987.
N, SORENSEN, - K.E. MAXWELL., “Taking a hands on” Approach to Diversity in Higher Education: A Critical Dialogical Model for Effective Intergroup Interaction, in Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 9(1),2009 3-35
No comments:
Post a Comment