Recontextualization

“Christianity, really, is a relationship with God. Faith is how God invites us into that relationship and how we will live in that relationship. As a teacher, I make sure my students understand these concepts. Many of them have no concept of an invitation to be in a relationship with God; they may not even know they are Loved. My job is to do whatever I can to let them know they are Loved by God, regardless of anything they do or say. Their own action in response to the invitation, their act of Faith, either deepens that relationship or it does not. Our acts of Faith are extensions of the invitation God gives us...we Love God and others in response to God's Love for us. I pray for the wisdom to help my students to grow in that Belovedness and in that Love.”

This is the blog where I am going to go into some deeper Theology of Pedagogical Theory and more explicit concepts related to what we call the Catholic Identity of our schools.

I have been thinking about this a great deal over the last week: “What is Catholic identity?” “What makes a school Catholic?” I will spare you all the details surrounding a chance encounter, but I will tell you that last week I had a 90-minute conversation with a fellow teacher and theologian about this exact topic. I expected the conversation to be just a short kind of information phone call where I could just learn a bit more about what he, his director, and their team are doing to answer these questions. It turned into a long conversation about what my future role in their research could potentially be. Let me see if I can simplify what he is working on.

St. Cecelia Cathedral, Omaha, Nebraska

Catholic schools identify their character, in general, in one of four different categories. The first, and perhaps the most common, is a “Christian Values Education” model. In response to increased trends of pluralism in the world, this model sort of edits the Catholic narrative and selects those popular parts that are shared with most other major belief systems in the world. Things like Justice, Equality, Education, and Goodness are stressed in this model, and the person of Jesus Christ is left in the margins. When this concept first appeared back in the 60s and the 70s, it was popular as it invited people into Christianity with these “Values”.  But as culture seems to be less and less familiar with the narrative of Christianity, namely the person of Jesus Christ, this model looks less and less like an invitation into a relationship with Jesus Christ. At best, it is a biography of Jesus.

Other Catholic schools identify with what my colleague and his team call Reconfessionalism. Essentially, Reconfessionalism focuses on doctrine and practice but lacks any dialogue with the surrounding culture. It is, of course, difficult to invite people into a relationship with Jesus if you are not willing to be in a relationship with them.

My Niece, Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart Class of 2018 and Her Grandparents. I wonder what sort of Catholic Identity her Alma Mater has.

The third model is Secularism. These are schools that are Catholic only because they have the word in their name. They are, essentially, college preparatory schools. They may produce intelligent and even “good” people, but the definition of “good” is relative to the popular culture. Like Reconfessionalism, there is no dialogue with any divergent ideology.

The final model is what my colleague and his team call Recontextualization. As I listened to him describe this concept, I got excited because it is exactly what I strive to do in my own classroom and what I have seen as being the most effective way to be Catholic and to invite my students into relationship with me and with Jesus. Recontextualization takes the “truths” which are familiar to the students or the surrounding culture, and interprets them, overtly and audibly, through the lens of Jesus Christ. More and more people in the modern world do not know the narrative of Jesus Christ or any of the Church teachings; Recontextualization does what it says: it takes the experienced Truth of the modern human and understands those Truths within the context of Jesus Christ. It takes a certain amount of Christian Anthropology, Christology, and Ontology in order to fully understand this, but in my experience (see my other blog on Sacramentality), if we do it right, Recontextualization can help our students (and fellow teachers) to encounter Jesus Christ.

I have been thinking about this a great deal, and maybe one of the reasons I am writing this blog is to begin articulating some of these thoughts and ideas. Maybe my dream is to be able to study this more formally and even help teachers and schools to “Recontextualize” their pedagogy through the lens of Jesus Christ. We’ll see.