Religion, Education, and Democracy: Generational Responsibility for the American Proposition

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course strives to form a new community of inquiry at the intersection of religion, education, and democracy. It is at such an intersection that the atrophy of each—the central problem to be grappled with in the course—is seen by many to be caused by the values of the other. Are such claims true? Are religion, education, and democracy so incommensurable today that together they can no longer facilitate social coherence, despite the fact that robust educational systems have long bolstered democratic and religious institutions alike? With the discipline of education as its platform and Catholicism, among other religious voices, as its particular conversation partner, the course examines historical, contemporaneous, and ecclesial resources, including Catholic notions of the common good, fraternal humanism, and ecological conversion, to ask, among other questions: What has religion to do with present anti-democratic trends, and what can be done educationally to reverse them? How do we understand education differently when we view it from the perspective of religion, and vice versa? Why is education so prevalent in and fundamental to religion, especially Catholicism, in the United States? As people call for book bans, students will write on how debate, discussion, and dissension are normed and modeled differently by religious and secular philosophies of education. They will also write, assuming a Catholic philosophy of education as normative, on what relationship religion should have with education if the latter is fundamental to democracy while democracy itself serves as the guarantor of religious liberty. The goal of the course is to produce a philosophy of education that engenders in the current generation of students responsibility to the American proposition—to reference the Jesuit John Courtney Murray’s paradigm—and what we can call a religiously-informed, normative vision of the promise of “America” today.