On Religious Education in a Pluralistic WorldChristian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Vision. Thomas H. Groome

Abstract

This is a major work in the area of Christian religious education. It may not be an exaggeration to say that it is the most important book on religious education to gain publication in the last several decades, and it may be the best book on the subject since Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture. If this were not enough, it also should be said that the book is of far greater significance than the specific field of religious education. For anyone excited by the renewal of practical theology, this book is a model of what that genre of writing should be. It is informed by the best contemporary scholarship in a variety of fields-theology, biblical studies, sociology and psychology, hermeneutics, and educational theory. The person thoroughly at home in each of these fields will not learn much that is new. But no book that I know in any area of practical theology puts all of these specialized disciplines together in such an artful and dialectical interweaving of the theoretical and practical. At the conclusion of this book, one will have a much clearer idea of how to be a practical religious educator (at any level), but one also will have a very clear idea of just why one should do it the way Thomas Groome recommends. And finally, the book is thoroughly ecumenical: it is written by a promising young Catholic scholar, but it can be used by Protestants as well and even, I would think, by imaginative Jewish educators.