Hermeneutical learning in religious education

Abstract

This article describes the contours of hermeneutical learning in the context of religious education. Hermeneutical learning is firstly distinguished from monoreligious learning and multireligious learning. Hermeneutical learning is based on a triple hermeneutic task: interpretation of text, context and the biography of the student, and avoids both monocorrelation and relativism. In realising this task, the concept of 'hermeneutical intersections' is introduced as well as criteria to deal with these 'conflicts of interpretations' in religious education. Finally, the role of the religious educator is developed as witness, specialist, and moderator in the hermeneutical learning process.

Enhancing Catholic School Identity: Shedding More Light

“…In response to my argument that Pollefeyt's 'hermeneutical process' cannot guarantee that 'different Catholics will not arrive at contradictory reinterpretations of "faith contents",' 94 Horner repeats Pollefeyt's statement that 'hermeneutics is not the same as relativism because a certain number of rules binds the hermeneutic interpretation.' 95 What I find revealing is that Horner, at this point, does not just tell us what these rules are. There are four of them, but it is the second that is immediately relevant to the issue.…”

Religious education as opening the hermeneutical space

“…In this contribution, I intend to focus on the Christian image of the human person that provides the basis of the hermeneutic-communicative model of Roman Catholic education (Lombaerts and Pollefeyt 2004;Pollefeyt 2020). Roman Catholic religion as a subject is confessional by nature and in orientation: the educator's point of departure is not some neutral anthropology (as if such a stance were possible), but is clearly coloured by a specific anthropology, one derived from the Jewish and Christian traditions (Burggraeve 2019).…”