Closing Reflections and Bibliography

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This course did not convince me of the value of religious education being taught across the curriculum. I have been on board since my earliest flirtations with Catholic writers and other Christian humanists. However, I leave this class with a new vocabulary and set of evidence to back my claims that this is the authentically Catholic vision of education that the leaders of the church want, and it uses the interdisciplinary methods that championing broadness in an age where thinking skills are being depleted due to intense early specialization geared toward entry in the economy. I do not expect we will ever de-emphasize STEM because of its monetary value. However, the Catholic genius has always been finding a both/and solution rather than forcing an either/or false dichotomy. At our best, our cliched motto could be, "Here comes everybody!" I am walking away from this class with a reaffirmed belief that all of the disciplines taught by and to all kinds of diverse people with different intelligence have a place at the table of plenty. I do see myself as a practicioner and advocate of the Christian humanist tradition, and I think that tradition must adapt and survive beyond the rapidly decaying technology that makes the rich get richer. We are the leaven for the STEM community, and we must look to redeem rather than wage the culture war of a Luddite.

Nonetheless, the personalist ethic and relational religious understanding that comes from following someone who is truly alive in Christ is severely challenged by the large number of scandals and abuse at the most authoritative levels of the church. Whoever is trying to do this in the best spirit of Catholicism must be ready to endure the ridicule deserved by those who have caused scandal. Perhaps, if the Catholic educator looks at his or her students in the way Christ looks at his disciples, then maybe all is not lost. I would like to see the Church do more to bolster Catholic identity in the schools, but becoming open and dealing with abusers swiftly and forcefully is the pressing need right now. In the end, it is on me to represent Christ as best I can so that my students may know the love of their Creator.

Thank you to Dr. Petriello and all the fine students who have accompanied me on this journey this summer. May God bless you in all your good works. Veni Sancte Spiritus. Veni per Mariam.

Bibliography

Aquila, Dominic. "The Value of a Catholic Liberal Arts Education." Catholic Education Resource Center, 1997.

Carron, Julian. Disarming Beauty. University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. pg 111.

Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) 1965.

Communion and Liberation. "About CL."

Duffy, Michael and D'Neil. Children of the Universe: Cosmic Education in the Montessori Elementary Classroom. Parent-Child Press, 2016. pg. 5.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 1963.

Lake, Kathy. "Integrated Curriculum." School Improvement Research Series, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1994. 

The New American Bible Revised Edition. The Catholic Study Bible. 3rd ed., edited by Donald Senior et al., Oxford UP, 2016.

Phenix, Philip. Education and the Worship of God. Westminster, 1966, 13-33. Chapter One.

Resources for REAC That Don't Smack of Religion

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Some of my old youth group friends can smell a Jesus juke a mile away. A church invites you to a free pizza night without mentioning the hellfire and damnation skit that will be the night's primary entertainment. On the other hand, the religious educator should be adept in finding religious themes that do not scream kitsch. Here are twenty resources worth checking out.

Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. Knopf, 2000. Binx Bolling’s search for authenticity and meaning free from ordinary despair amidst a life of passive receptivity in New Orleans cinemas, attempted sexual conquests, and competing narratives of how to live from more experienced family members. The novel is semi-autobiographical by a Catholic convert who deemed himself a pathologist of the soul. It has an Augustinian bent about it and makes a subtle reference to the little way of St. Therese, perhaps the most popular saint of ordinary rather than extraordinary holiness.

O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. Farrar, Straus, and Giraux, 2007. Hazel Motes is a lonely nihilist preaching a church without Christ, yet somehow though bizarre and violent means, the authenticity of his via negativa approach to God is validated by a subtly implied baptism. If Haze can be saved, dare we hope for all of us?

Greene, Graham. The End of the Affair. Penguin, 2004. This journal of hate is another via negativa approach to God, one born of an illicit sexual affair and an apparent act of God that the protagonist would have done without. The end of the story is not happy, but the reader is left to question what change has occurred and what might happen next.

Malick, Terrence, director. The Tree of Life. ICON, 2011. From a director who had wanted to film The Moviegoer prior to Katrina, this film is also a semi-autobiographical reflection on the meaning of life and the dualistic struggle between grace and nature in light of a life defining loss. This also has an Augustinian feel to it, not only with its confessional narrative but with its need to incorporate the history of the universe since creation into the narrator’s sense of self and belonging.

Johnson, Mark Steven, director. Simon Birch. 1998. This loose adaptation of A Prayer for Owen Meany deals with providence, friendship, grief, and the makings of a hero (perhaps a saint) from a very unlikely and severely flawed young boy who views himself as an instrument of God.

Hinton, S. E. The Outsiders. Speak, 2006. Ponyboy Curtis plays the beloved evangelist to Christ figure Johnny Cade who is marginalized by society, wrongfully accused, and sacrifices himself to save the lives of children. The story deals with gang violence, family trials, and the quest for the good and for permanence.

Weir, Peter, director. The Truman Show. 1998. This film is a precursor to the reality television age. It deals with exploitation of people, deception, why we feel the need to be entertained, why we choose to live vicariously through television personas, and enlightenment. An analogy to Plato’s cave can be made, as well as a discussion of whether it is better to live with the hard truth or blissful ignorance. The film also has another implied baptism scene followed by a kind of stairway to heaven.

Darabont, Frank, director. The Green Mile. 1999. Darabont’s adaptation of a Stephen King thriller deals with man’s inhumanity to man and the death penalty though the story of John Coffey, an innocent black man with healing gifts awaiting his execution. The story is told from the point of view of a prison guard named Paul. The allegory is obvious once it’s pointed out.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ignatius Press, 2011. Considering the scholarship devoted to understanding Shakespeare’s Catholic family heritage and the religious bloodshed of the time, the tragedy takes on new light. Catholics? Anglicans? “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” but are divisions between Christians a type of spiritual suicide for the church’s mission? We can also facilitate a discussion about responsibility and maturity in love.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Arthur A. Levine Books, 2009. The Harry
Potter series is full of Christian allegory, but let’s leave on one final confrontation between good and
evil involving the hero’s death and resurrection, all to save his friends.

Wolfe, Suzanne. The Confessions of X. Thomas Nelson, 2016. This piece of historical fiction tells the
scandalous story of St. Augustine through the eyes of the unnamed concubine he abandoned.

Unkrich, Lee and Adrian Molina, directors. Coco, 2017. A child's misadventure on the Day of the      Dead serves as a reminder of the importance of memory, mercy, and family.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin Harxourt, 2012. Tolkien hated
allegories right? Gandalf/Frodo/Aragorn =Prophet/Priest/King in this fantasy apocalypse.

Undset, Sigrid. Kristin Lavransdatter. Penguin Classics, 2005. A young woman's rash decisions
cause her to suffer the consequences that lead to her redemption.

Scorsese, Martin, director. Silence, 2016. How can a story about Jesuits who forsake their vows              prompt a viewer to be more Christlike? Somehow this one does.

Lee, Spike, director. Malcolm X, 1992. Worthy for the violence suffered that provoked by any means

necessary as much as the process of conversion that brought him to peace with others.

Taylor, Daniel. Death Comes for the Deconstructionist. A detective story that moonlights as a satire 

and hits the jackpot with its philosophical and theological weight.

Stillman, Whit, director. Metroplitan, 1990. A look at the New York debutante scene through the
lens of a modern day Jane Austen still holding virtue with the highest regard.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage, 2004.  The Catholic imagination of Toni Morrison is seldom              commented on, but the degrees of concupiscence attached to social sin are on display.

Kass, Leon, ed. Being Human: Core Readings in the Humanities. W. W. Norton & Co., 2004.
This may be the perfect textbook for an AP English or honors interdisciplinary capstone class

for high school seniors. Small selections from all genres and disciplines focused on the
meaning of our humanity through all the seasons of our life.

Assessing REAC

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Perhaps the only assessments that matter are whether the child makes it to heaven and how soon and how much of heaven gets into the child before heaven is reached. I could offer another term paper on the damage done by our obsessively assessing educational culture, the arbitrariness of grades, the hypocrisy of valuing differentiated instruction while teaching towards a standardized test, and so on. But that is another day's battle.

Many teachers buck at the interdisciplinary approach to learning because it means they may have to value intelligences different from their own which are harder to assign a number value to. Furthermore, because of the open-ended conversational creative collaboration that happens in the classroom with this type of instruction, the need for more subjective grades arise. I am not suggesting objective grades be discarded. However, much more of what is valued in the class should be the student's growth, persistence, creativity, and collaboration in the process with a learning community. Keep the children engaged, lessen grade anxiety, and your students will make progress on those standardized tests that you didn't view as the end-all, be-all of your instruction.

Consultation with colleagues and peers inside and outside of your school could provide some skeletons for you to work with, but the composed and knowledgeable reaction to your children's insights will mean more than any borrowed lesson plan. You must model what you teach, both as a Christian and as a lifelong learner. Priests, religious, and lay theologians would be worthy spiritual counsels for this endeavor provided they have a sense of worldly knowledge and are looking to redeem creation and the culture rather than make war with it.

Examples of REAC in Practice

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So for these examples, I am giving two frameworks for small add-on lesson in a supposedly "secular" class by a religious education teacher. One will be akin to my trained discipline.  The other might be more suited for my brother whose art has been gracing these posts.

* * * * * * *

            The first is following a high school lesson in either American literature, American history, or civics where "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr. is used.

As a religion teacher following this lesson focused on Dr. King’s use of explicitly religious rhetoric, both in the sense of Judeo-Christian religious values but also the civil religion of the American ideal which borrows heavily from Christian principles, I do not have much need to be creative with finding my metaphor. King explicitly cites the conscientious objection of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abdenego to the demands of worship from Nebuchadnezzar and the Roman practice of feeding to lions Christians practicing their faith in opposition to the law. (King , par. 17) King is implicitly asserting the same thing as Peter in front of the Sanhedrin when responding to their  demand to stop teaching, “We must obey God rather than men” (NABRE, Acts 5:29).

Beyond this, I see an additional metaphor that may be used from King’s rhetorical stylings. By invoking the religious principles the white clergymen profess and pointing out their hypocrisy and contradictions, King is leading these clergymen on an examination of conscience with specific applications to social justice. I would hope that my students were familiar with the examen by the time they reach tenth grade, but if not, they would have certainly approached it frequently in the context of my religion class.

King cites Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in his development of his ideas on just laws and the necessity of disobeying unjust laws (King, par. 12-13). I would present a timeline beginning with Hebrew Scripture and moving through the ages to show examples of the development of Catholic and other Christian sensibilities on just and unjust laws. I would include recent examples of holy civil disobedience and conscientious objection such as Charles Lwanga and his companions, Bonhoeffer, the White Rose movement, Dorothy Day, and Daniel Berrigan. We would read some excerpts of these primary sources and watch video clips about their activities. I would build on this sense of applying Scripture to social justice issues by looking at contemporary issues. If this class was occurring in the summer of 2018, I would not hesitate to apply church teaching to the separation of families at the Mexican border, using official church documents, responses of church authorities, news articles covering the religious dimension of the issue, and even pop culture analysis from celebrities who draw some inspiration from their faith.

Once we have considered all the presented information, we begin a Socratic seminar where the students keep one foot planted in the materials they have received in class while being encouraged to make connections to their other sources of learning, including pop culture and personal experience, asking questions of each other about the root causes and potential solutions to these injustices.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The second lesson plan suggestion is for an add-on to an art class dealing with the concepts of light and darkness. The religious educator should be encouraging the sense of mystery evoked by the art to help the students develop their spirituality.

In this lesson, I would draw a religious parallel to the sense of light and dark. We would look at the
Scriptures with the oft-repeated analogies of good and evil to the light and darkness. But I would add to
this a look at II Corinthians 11:14 and the idea of a negative connotation to the light with Satan's
masquerading as an angel of light. I would also look at the notion of holy darkness, perhaps using the song
from Dan Schutte, but also elaborating on this sense of unknowing in the spiritual life, mystery, the dark
night of the soul perhaps. I would ask the students what were their emotional connections to light and
darkness. We would then look at several images, explicitly religious and not so, a greater sense of light and
darkness in images of both kind. We would discuss the feelings they associate with the artists' choices.

Works Cited:

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 1963.

The New American Bible Revised Edition. The Catholic Study Bible. 3rd ed., edited by Donald Senior et al., Oxford UP, 2016.

How to Practice REAC

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Any shift to interdisciplinary educations is likely to raise some understandable concerns among teachers. Those who are trained in a discipline may not feel comfortable with their content knowledge. Teachers who are overworked to begin with may face an additional amount of time lesson planning because of the necessary amount of collaborative planning. Teachers who are set on doing things their way may find a loss of some autonomy in planning and scheduling curriculums. Some teachers caught in the trap of teaching to the test may take issue with the spontanaiety that occurs as students make conceptual connections while developing higher level thinking skills, but my experience is that the interdisciplinary teacher finds rising test scores because their pupils learn how to process all sorts of information and solve problems creatively.

The added religious dimension in REAC brings on fears of being unworthy, unqualified, perhaps even non-practicing and unbelieving. How can you give such an inspired view of creation that you have not cultivated for yourself.

None of these are unworkable problems, provided a school does not rush into REAC. Perhaps more time at staff meetings and professional development days ought be taken away from those trendy reviews of methodology and given to spiritual guidance and intellectual interdisciplinary study. Teachers are lifelong learners, but what happens when all they study is education. They may gain new tricks, but they cut off from the source and destination of their vocation. Principals should guide the way to the common good for a whole staff and student body prudently, yet allow those capable of rising to the occasion do so.

Parents will be the easier buy-in. Show them the studies, and then show them their children engaged in their studies. Invite them to teacher reading groups to discuss the kind of learning they haven't experienced since college. They are your students' primary educators. Integrate them into the learning community.

Finally, I would add the five tenets of Luigi Giussani's educational method. The educators must encounter Christ, their Creator who loves them. In response to this love, they develop a fidelity to the tradition of the church. Those who would teach then become authorities to whom people are attracted because they are authentically living the life they are proposing, which in this context is necessarily finding the needs of the human heart met through an encounter with Christ in all of creation. From there, the authority educates with respect for criticism and personal verification rather than memorization of stock answers. Finally, the educator, out of respect for the students' freedom, takes risk and encourages them to do likewise by considering ideas other than their teachers'. While the first two or three of these is consistent with Catholic tradition for centuries, the latter two are incredibly progressive and reflective of Giussani's Catholic existentialism which honors the person's freedom to come to know the Creator and creation as they really are rather than only as the teacher has proclaimed.

Why REAC?

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I first gleaned a personalist philosophy of education from Dorothy Day and John Paul II, but I have recently found a kindred spirit in Maria Montessori and others who practice her methodology. Montessori was a Catholic herself, and there is a very strong Augustinian mark in her grand narrative approach in interdisciplinary education. Where Augustine sets his confessional autobiography in the much larger context of the creation of the universe, Montessori begins with creation to help the child become a lifelong discoverer of their identity. In Children of the Universe: Cosmic Education in the Montessori Classroom, Michael and D’Neil Duffy expound on the fundamental nature of the question, “Who am I?”:

"The child’s answers are the beginning of a search for identity, something to define who the child really is as a member of the human species and as an individual apart from everything else in the world. They are an attempt to capture the individual at the present moment of time. This attempt to define the child is intimately joined with two other aspects of the child’s identity, representing the past and the future."

This sense of discovering identity, one’s place in the creation, corresponds well with Catholic educators understanding the child is created in the image of God. Our role in introducing the child to the Creator

helps the child understand the wonder of his or her own creation.

I recently enjoyed the consolation of knowing a student figured out what I was getting at in English class. One of my eighth grade students accidentally recognized the goal of a cosmic education during his farewell speech at the breakfast held on the morning of graduation. When praising his introduction to the beauty of literature as a means to pursue God, he kept coming back to how discovering who he really is in my classroom being the best thing he took away from the school.

I am fond of the way both St. Augustine’s Confessions and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life both have a grand personal narrative that necessitates going back to the creation as part of their story. The Catholic educator, understanding that humanity is created in the image of God, can draw from both the rich religious tradition of finding God through his creation and the common sense understanding that any creator is revealing his or her personal attributes in their varied creations in a somewhat veiled way, ought to see the creation and the Creator as the primary sources for whatever discipline they are teaching. 

As an English teacher, I keep coming back to the first chapter of John, knowing that the Word who created the world was God and became flesh. The idea of making sense of any assembling of words takes me back to two moments, the abstraction of the Word making tangible creation before becoming incarnate in the creation, so I am always looking for ways to make the origins of creation and the creator tangible to my students. For me, it begins with my presence with my students, and I want an appreciation of the creation both at its roots in God and immediately in front of me with each child to be a tangible witness to my classes. I would imagine the process of understanding this role may be different for other teachers across the disciplines, and even among teachers with the same faith teaching the same disciplines. Nonetheless, if we follow our understanding to its origin, we arrive together at the same creation and Creator, finding ourselves in the same role of being little creators in our classrooms.

The importance of Catholic worship and devotion to a God who is found in all things will keep the faith from becoming compartmentalized and devoid of its transformative power by being segregated to the religion classroom. This will benefit the church and the world, the church by allowing it to truly be the salt of the earth, and the world, not only by the salvific message of the church but by the growth of scientific and cultural pursuits motivated by religious devotion.

But why would we adopt religious education across the curriculum and the interdisciplinary teaching that goes along with it? This model of teaching across disciplines is consistent with findings showing students excel whenever they can see the interrelatedness between what is being taught in, especially as it relates to them personally. Transfer of learning from class to class is encouraged in the process. Students grasp new material with greater ease whenever it is presented in a way that builds on their previous knowledge. Kathy Lake notes "that schools must look at education as a process for developing abilities required by life in the twenty-first century, rather than discrete, departmentalized subject matter.

Father Julian Carron expands on this notion in his recent book, Disarming Beauty. He writes, "The task falls to the educator not to close all the person's energy on this one aspect (of disciplinary specialization) alone, squandering it, but to relaunch the cognitive process as openness to the whole, starting with that particular factor: 'Modern scientific reason . . . bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology."

Ultimately, as Catholic educators, we were charged to combat this dehumanizing specialization during the Second Vatican Council. "The Church in the Modern World", Gaudium et Spes includes these words in paragraph 61:

"Today it is more difficult to form a synthesis of the various disciplines of knowledge and the arts than it was formerly. For while the mass and the diversity of cultural factors are increasing, there is a decrease in each man's faculty of perceiving and unifying these things, so that the image of 'universal man' is being lost sight of more and more. Nevertheless it remains each man's duty to retain an understanding of the whole human person in which the values of intellect, will, conscience, and fraternity are preeminent. These values are all rooted in God the Creator and have been wonderfully restored and elevated in Christ."

Works Cited:

Carron, Julian. Disarming Beauty. University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. pg 111.

Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html

Duffy, Michael and D'Neil. Children of the Universe: Cosmic Education in the Montessori Elementary Classroom. Parent-Child Press, 2016. pg. 5.

Lake, Kathy. "Integrated Curriculum." School Improvement Research Series, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1994. 

What is REAC?

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Religious Education Across the Curriculum, or REAC for short, is an interdisciplinary approach to education that finds a coherent revelation of the Creator in all of creation, thus all disciplines inherently possess a religious dimension. As much as one part of the creation cannot be fundamentally removed from the context of the whole of creation, a consilience between disciplines is recognized. I think any fair introduction to the concept of REAC in a Catholic context would also involve an incarnational worldview where the material world and human experience have been elevated into participation in the divine by Christ, and the secular/sacred dichotomy is recognized as something forced. We find God in all things, and we approach all things in light of one thing, the ultimate meaning found in God who is worthy of supreme devotion. I find a correlation in the words of Christ and Kierkegaard, namely that the pure at heart shall see God (Matthew 5:8) and that purity of heart is to will one thing. Our understanding of the meaning of life and the purpose of creation is found in Christ, so it makes sense that we would want to propose his relevance in all things.

This fits the Catholic tradition of not only speaking to all disciplines of knowledge, but also to the devotion spurred by faith to pursue greater knowledge of creation through the sciences, the cultivation of beauty in the arts, and the contributions to social institutions contributing to the common good. Phillip Phenix calls this impulse the sacred secular, and it is in these moments where the church’s existence as salt of the earth comes to light. In the same manner, the reduction of religion to a corner of human experience robs religion of its supreme importance, and the secular sacred of a cultural Catholicism that does not transform the lives of those called to set the world ablaze.

In his article, “The Value of a Catholic Liberal Arts Education,” Dominic Aquila rejects the cult of method and technical specialization in favor of a Louise Cowan modeled pursuit of the beautiful and real that is attained through a broader liberal arts approach. Cowan was one of the great literary critics of the twentieth century.  She and her physicist husband Donald were both Catholic converts and philosophers of education who were instrumental in building the University of Dallas. I was privileged to attend one of her last public lectures in the months before her death. She was teaching The Brothers Karamazov one last time in a way that was deeply moving, reaching the core of human desires and frustrations. The reading was alive because she was awake to the world around her and found beauty in the motions of being human. There was a warmth in her instruction where we felt like welcome guests. I don’t think this gets displayed in the never-ending saga of compartmentalized packets and projects. Cowan was not teaching the catechism, however her faith was very evidently incarnate in front of us, and she gave her audience, mostly teachers in North Texas, a model to imitate.

The commands of Scripture are to preach the Gospel in season and out of season, and there is a way the Gospel may be revealed in a science or English or math class. We are told that God so loved the cosmos that he gave his Son, and this idea of cosmos consumes all sorts of cultural and scientific pursuits. We are of a catholic faith, and its catholicity can be found in the universal variety of experience and endeavors. And where Cowan’s work at the University of Dallas had a Benedictine influence, we can also see the God in all things approach in Ignatian spirituality. It is doubtlessly at the heart of all of the differences made in the lives of students who attend Jesuit institutions. And my own spiritual tradition through Communion and Liberation insists that reality, existence itself, is a gift, and that we encounter Christ in this reality we are given.

Key Learning Outcomes for Blog Readers

• The readers will remember to contemplate the beauty, truth, and goodness that is evident in all of creation.
• The readers will encounter Christ through this contemplation.
• The readers will grow in understanding of creation in the light of Christ their Creator.
• The reader will understand themselves better because they are a part of creation created in the image of their Creator.
• The reader will have a beginner's grasp on methodology, knowing it is secondary to both Christ and content knowledge.
• The reader will adapt that methodology based on the personal dynamics of their colleagues and students.

Works Cited

Aquila, Dominic. "The Value of a Catholic Liberal Arts Education." Catholic Education Resource Center, 1997.

Phenix, Philip. Education and the Worship of God. Westminster, 1966, 13-33. Chapter One.

Introducing Myself and the Blog

With my wife at my school's gala fundraiser.

My name is Toby D'Anna, and I am creating this blog initially for a graduate level course in Religious Education Across the Curriculum taken through Loyola Institute for Ministry.  I am beginning as dean of students at a Catholic pk-8 school in a Seattle suburb. I taught high school English for one year, middle school English for three years, and middle school math for two years. I spent five years in leadership with a Catholic literary and philosophical society that helped college students find the connections between the faith and their chosen disciplines. A Catholic convert myself, I have spent the last three years as a catechist in my parish's RCIA program. I am a member of Communion and Liberation, a lay movement in the church that grounds its members in the educational method of the late Monsignor Luigi Giussani. Because both my strongest academic curiosities and the beginning of my Catholic faith were sparked in a college honors program focused on a systematic interdisciplinary reading and socratic discussion of the great books in light of contemporary issues, I have tried to pass that same torch which lit my way onto my students at every level and from all backgrounds. This blog will serve as a manual primarily for my future use, although it will be shared with colleagues who are seeking to implement REAC at their schools.