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From Prof John M Hull writings |
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Written by Roger Prentice
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Thursday, 30 November 2006 |
Three of my favourite quotations from the writings of Professor John M Hull:-
1) The entire value of the charitable giving of the people of the United Kingdom was exceeded in the first few hours of the Iraq war.....................
If spirituality is ambiguous, one of the contributions of education to spiritual development lies in the resolution of ambiguity. This means helping the pupils to distinguish the constructive use of money from its destructive use, and this should be done through examples relevant to the day to day life of the pupil as well as examples taken from such issues as currency speculation, debt repayment and warfare (Hull 1999a). Discussions like this should take place in business studies, economics and current affairs
(Hull 2001), and can be strengthened by links with the teachings of the great religions about money. If it is true that money represents the mutilated image of God in human society, helping young people to identify the distortions of this false transcendence may perhaps lead them to contemplate the transcendence of transcendence, the transcendence greater that which none can be conceived.
http://www.johnmhull.biz/is%20there%20a%20spirituality%20of%20money.htm
2) Religious education contributes to human spiritualisation in so far as it helps people to advance in their self knowledge and their knowledge of the world, and also advance their knowledge and understanding of the Ultimate. This divine Ultimate may be studied as expressed in one religion or several. In view of the fact that the specific goals of religious education deal with knowledge and understanding, it seems preferable to religiously educate from more than one religion. Only in this way can the learners acquire a cognitive perspective which will help them to transcend the limits of their earlier self-understanding and world-understanding.
Religious education, however, does not seek to develop, in the specifically religious sense. Schools in particular and education as a whole should encourage young people to have a trustful and optimistic faith in life and in themselves and others, and that is the wider definition of faith of which we spoke earlier. The narrow definition of faith, whether in religion as a whole or whether in specific religions, is beyond the scope of education and thus beyond the scope of religious education.
If religious education were to seek to nurture faith in any specific religion, it would no longer be religious education as we have described it, but would be better described as religious nurture. Religious nurture in the form of Christian nurture or Islamic nurture has an important part to play in human spirituality, because the religions are agents of human spirituality. Education, however, is only concerned with that humanisation and spiritualisation which flow from increased knowledge and understanding. These
represent important, indeed essential contributions towards spirituality, but they are not necessarily the only paths to spirituality and they do not necessarily take the learner to the mountain top.
It is enough for us as teachers and leaders of youth that we refuse to accept economic, social, educational and physical limits which prevent the children and young people in our care from entering upon the process of becoming more human, and thus exploring and developing their potential nature as spiritual (i.e, truly and deeply human).
http://www.johnmhull.biz/Spirituality,%20religion,%20faith.html
3) We have seen that there is a natural spirituality of disability which points to the variety of human bodies and of human experiences as making up the whole human world, and that this poses a challenge to the structures of unequivocal power which rule our world. We have also seen that to some extent the Christian faith produces and collaborates with this hegemony of power. We have also seen from the rich variety of its ambiguity that the disabilist theologian may be able to recover elements which may form the basis for a theology of disability. Such a theology will link with a spirituality of disability in the sense that it will give specific religious articulation to the natural, experienced spirituality of the various conditions of disabled people, as each learns how to transfigure and transcend the limits of his or her biology.
The position outlined in this article is not without its own ambiguity. One would not expect doctors to give up the fight against disease on the grounds that it is good to encourage a variety of human worlds, nor would we expect an ophthalmologist not to do his or her best to save someone’s sight because of his respect for the blind world. The concept of an epistemological world is not intended to avoid the varieties of human suffering, but to honour the distinctiveness of the experience of those who permanently reside in various states. Let us hope that the Christian faith which has always motivated its adherents towards the alleviation of suffering will prove equally effective in motivating Christians to recognise variety and to challenge the concentrations of exclusive power.
http://www.johnmhull.biz/A%20Spirituality%20of%20Disability1.htm
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 02 December 2006 )
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