Abstract
As a result of three decades of social-cultural transformation, Bulgarian literature and practice of religious education though still rare is increasing and improving. As the Church recovers, local parishes, monasteries, and convents become visibly re-socialised and motivated again to provide more adequate pastoral care for all ages. This study explores the importance of informal improvisation and innovation as an approach, in the best interest of children and youth, at a time when an effective, regulated mass public religious education system in Bulgaria is not likely to appear soon. At the same time, revitalised eparchial, parish, convent, and monastery centres start meeting actual needs of renewed church ethos, and begin to provide opportunities for religious socialisation of children and youth that is more functional. Based on direct and indirect experience, on observation, and on partial access to limited local empirical data (that is historically and/or anthropologically only partially explored and categorised), this paper contributes to the analysis of the following unresolved issue: how to direct research toward and keep account of well-known educational and pastoral practices, whether traditional or contemporary, that aid the effective and sustainable religious socialisation of children and youth.
Highlights
Resocialisation of confessional education in Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Christian Church had become part of the democratisational cultural transformation process
New forms of religious education were perceived as forming traditional identity, and gradually became more than particular heritage elements integrated in a general curriculum
Theologians needed pedagogical training and experience, just as kindergarten, school, college, and university teachers needed catechetical, church-based socialisation. By such joint expertise and vocation (Legkostup, 2019, 2017, 2015, 2012) church ethos started regaining its links to family, youth, children, subcultures and even to other public sectors thereby acquiring better socialisation overall
Summary
Resocialisation of confessional education in Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Christian Church had become part of the democratisational cultural transformation process. Neither local contemporary history of parishes nor monastic educational activities became the object of considerable scholarly interest Their virtue of humility, respect for collective and hierarchical principles of religious organisation, and the problematic subsidising of post-socialist activities for children and social care in general initially prevented clergy from engaging professionals in church spheres until they became conscious, active parish, monastery, or convent members, concerned, passive observers. It was not just pedagogical analysts who were not provided with enough consistent, reliable, public data. Two local theological approaches to confessional resocialisation that represent the memory and the idea of Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Christianity developed as movements, being either more open to shared European and global cultural values, or more closed, clinging to reconstructed yet archaic, strictly traditional local organisation, and referencing identity and values that were reconsidered or revived
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