Emerging from the experience of a Brisbane-based intentional Christian community, this reflection... more Emerging from the experience of a Brisbane-based intentional Christian community, this reflection explores how right belief, right desire and right action may fuse when discipleship centres on embodied spiritual practices. Spiritual formation, like physical training, takes repetitive exercise against resistance under supervision; and yet, lackadaisical disciples readily dismiss classic disciplines and cast off traditional liturgies as hackneyed litanies. Through enriching everyday actions and secular practices with cognitively deep and affectively engaging rituals, we can powerfully appeal to the imagination through the body in this age of apatheism. In so doing, we participate in shaping committed spiritual athletes who together work out the way of Jesus for the life of the world.
This article considers the Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority's (ACARA) p... more This article considers the Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority's (ACARA) plan for Civics and Citizenship, assessing the role of religions therein. Through a dialectical hermeneutic, ACARA is brought into a mutually critical conversation with the work of curriculum theorist Dwayne Huebner. Both of their distinct visions are found to make space for diverse religious identities, and to affirm students taking responsibility for what they make of this world. They clash, however, over the path to societal harmony and the place given to discussing our deepest differences in belief and practice. In this article it is argued that a constructive use of Sacred Texts in Civics and Citizenship may facilitate a synergy between ACARA and Huebner that is educationally viable and democratically profitable. This would require that curriculum content is decentred to serve a dialogical pedagogy built on the sharing of our foundational narratives as together we pursue the common good.
Emerging from the experience of a Brisbane-based intentional Christian community, this reflection... more Emerging from the experience of a Brisbane-based intentional Christian community, this reflection explores how right belief, right desire and right action may fuse when discipleship centres on embodied spiritual practices. Spiritual formation, like physical training, takes repetitive exercise against resistance under supervision; and yet, lackadaisical disciples readily dismiss classic disciplines and cast off traditional liturgies as hackneyed litanies. Through enriching everyday actions and secular practices with cognitively deep and affectively engaging rituals, we can powerfully appeal to the imagination through the body in this age of apatheism. In so doing, we participate in shaping committed spiritual athletes who together work out the way of Jesus for the life of the world.
This article considers the Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority's (ACARA) p... more This article considers the Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority's (ACARA) plan for Civics and Citizenship, assessing the role of religions therein. Through a dialectical hermeneutic, ACARA is brought into a mutually critical conversation with the work of curriculum theorist Dwayne Huebner. Both of their distinct visions are found to make space for diverse religious identities, and to affirm students taking responsibility for what they make of this world. They clash, however, over the path to societal harmony and the place given to discussing our deepest differences in belief and practice. In this article it is argued that a constructive use of Sacred Texts in Civics and Citizenship may facilitate a synergy between ACARA and Huebner that is educationally viable and democratically profitable. This would require that curriculum content is decentred to serve a dialogical pedagogy built on the sharing of our foundational narratives as together we pursue the common good.
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