INSEGNARE A CREDERE. COSTRUZIONE DEGLI STATI NAZIONALI E INSEGNAMENTO DELLA RELIGIONE NELL’EUROPA CONTEMPORANEA (BRESCIA, 23-24 SETTEMBRE 2011)

HOW TO TEACH TO BELIEVE

Nation building and teaching religion in contemporary Europe

(Brescia, 23-34 September 2011)

PRESENTATION

The role of religion in Europe, after the dissolution of the Ancien Régime, changed deeply in the last two centuries. Christian churches and denominations, even when they were predominant in a single nation, went under discussion either because of the laicization of the ruling powers and of the secularization of the society. Only in very recent decades the reality of a multireligious society has risen in a very different form from the former existence of significant religious minorities, as for instance the Jewish communities and the members of another christian church.

After the French Revolution the process of establishment of the national states, with the dissolution of the multinational empires, has increased, and also exacerbated in many circumstances, the role of the people’s identity in the populations of the European continent, from the Atlantic to the Urals, albeit with a very different temporal scanning from country to country. Inside this historical process the church institutions and the religious affiliations have found their places, according to several variations: they were deeply connected with the identity processes, even if sometimes with ambiguous or even harmful results.

In a process of acculturation of the European populations, there was a growing role either of the state, following the assertion of the need for a public education, and of the different churches in the religious instruction of the faithful. In that period concordances and differences, cooperation and competition have occurred in the field of education: whose implications need a comprehensive and comparative evaluation.

The purpose of the conference is to examine, from a historical perspective and in the last two centuries, the methods and the results of a "teaching to believe", with a heavy fallout on the education of the citizens: .i.e. not limited to teaching religion in the schools or in any extracurricular form

Introduzione generale

(Introductory speech)

Roberto Rusconi

Università Roma Tre

Relazione introduttiva

(Introductory paper)

Flavio Pajer

Pontificia Università Salesiana, Roma

L'insegnamento scolastico della religione in Europa

[Teaching religion at school in Europe]

Relazioni

(Papers)

Jean Bauberot

École Pratique des Hautes Etudes

Tra laicità e religione: l’insegnamento prima e dopo il 1905

[Entre laicité et religion: enseigner avant et après 1905]

Fulvio De Giorgi

Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia

La Chiesa e l’infanzia a scuola

[Church and children at school]

Vladimir Fedorov

Russian Christian Institute of Humanities, St. Petersburg

Ortodossia e insegnamento in età contemporanea

[Orthodoxy and teaching in the last two centuries]

Alessandro Ferrari

Università dell’Insubria

La religione e la legge, gli stati e la chiesa di fronte all’insegnamento

[Religion and law, states and church regarding teaching]

Maria Chiara Giorda

Università di Torino

Chiesa e insegnamento in Italia

[Chuch and teaching in Italy]

Robert Jackson

University of Warwick

Educazione e religione in età contemporanea nel Regno Unito

[Education and religion in the United Kingdom in the last two centuries]

Javier Martínez-Torrón

Universidad Complutense

Madrid

I rapporti tra Chiesa, educazione e stato in Spagna

[Relations between church, education and state in Spain]

Wolfram Weisse

Universität Hamburg

La religione nell’insegnamento dal Kaiserreich alla Bundesrepublik

[Teaching religion from Kaiserreich to Bundesrepublik]

Considerazioni conclusive

(Closing speech)

Daniele Menozzi

(Scuola Normale Superiore – Pisa)