Faith-based schooling

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The Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, Alan Harper, is quite right to draw attention to the need to integrate faith-based education in schools and colleges to help in combating sectarianism.

The Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, Alan Harper, is quite right to draw attention to the need to integrate faith-based education in schools and colleges to help in combating sectarianism. In doing so he is just clipping the tip of an iceberg: potentially the biggest iceberg of the lot. The importance of integrating studies in religion – at every level – cannot be overestimated.
Cardinal Brady is entitled to defend single-faith schools, but the perpetuation of the system either for the sake of sustaining a particular heritage, or on the basis of the unsustainable argument of a superior or exclusive theological correctness, aggravates both regional and world problems and does not alleviate them.
Without recognition of the continuing evolution of theological understanding, single faith education reinforces barriers and division.
All world religions have been impacted upon by others during their formation. None have been established in isolation: certainly not Yahwism and the Abrahamic faiths. Each have been affected both positively and negatively by interaction.
Many major theological institutions now appoint teaching staff from non-core faiths, and such dialogue and cooperation is vital to human harmony, communal stability and progress – and to avoid disintegration.
But such dialogue must be seen as only a stage in the process of theological evolution. This demands that scholars and enlightened clergy of sll faiths collaborate in deliberate and carefully planned programs of reassessment of fundamental theological concepts and practices around which their commnuities divide, and which are the basis of conflict.
Leaders of all faiths and their non-tertiary teaching institutions must recognize this and do the same. Archbishop Harper’s initiative cannot be brushed aside.
Ian Fry

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