Faith and Education

Christopher Dawson, a twentieth century historian, once described the inseparable links between religion, culture, and society.  He explained that each civilization is the expression of a certain culture–that is, an institutional embodiment of the collective religious and social traditions of a particular people.  Furthermore, each culture is inextricably linked to a particular religion; culture proceeds from cult, he observed, and the two form an essential, symbiotic relationship.  A healthy civilization, then, carries and reflects this religious identity.

But what of the modern West, where faith is often left quite deliberately out of the public square?  Religious belief is widely seen as a private matter, best confined to Sunday worship and bedtime prayers.  Yet far from private, religious traditions propose answers to our fundamental questions, demanding a constant, active response–not lukewarm passivity.  When divorced from such roots, any society is assured a slow, steady process of decay.

Now where does this leave Christian schools today?  Founded upon a venerable religious tradition, these societal microcosms are faced with the same challenge.  How do students and administrators live out their fundamental beliefs?  Do they pursue active lives of faith, consciously guided by tradition?  Or is such belief simply an additional partition of their collective identity, accessed seldomly on Sundays and Baccalaureate Masses?

The active engagement in religious tradition is a necessary element to human flourishing; its renewal is the task of each generation, and our schools are not exempted from this duty.