Values in Narratives: Religious Education as an Exercise in Emotional Rationality

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The domain of education deals with the issue of the possibility of a person’s development so that the person would learn to become more human through the educational process. An integral part of a person’s development is first and foremost the dimension of an individual’s integration into society. Education for values plays an indispensable role in education. The technical aspect of education—as John Macmurray described it—has its foundation in instrumental rationality, aiming at the realization of utilitarian values in order to achieve the necessary social cooperation for the purpose of an easier coexistence. That so-called instrumental conception of life has given birth to a special type of the contemporary human being, homo faber. If, however, we strive to achieve the complete development of a human being through education, which is more fully realized only in the communion of people in the forms of friendship, fellowship and love, this instrumental conception requires enrichment through a communitarian conception of life, aimed at the realization of intrinsic values. In that sense, this article explores the contemplative and relational aspects of education from the perspective of religious education, which, according to John Macmurray, are based on the emotional level of rationality which results in the acquisition and adoption of intrinsic individual and inter-individual values. The aim of this article is to show that when it comes to education, these values are best conveyed through narratives. The article also attempts to shed light on the way students internalize and personalize intrinsic values through their emotional familiarity with the narratives, and especially with the value of reciprocity, which is key to authentic religious practice, and thus also to ethical awareness, which is important for the formation of moral awareness and character of a human being. Furthermore, the article explores the extent to which narratives as a form of religious knowledge are important in religious education, and in which they contribute to the formation of students’ opinions, attitudes and identities as transmitters of religious truths. Narratives notably carry a strong potential for the spiritual transformation of one’s personal and social life in such a way that they can motivate students to accept and realize certain religious and moral practices through experiential touching of values. Examples of narratives used in religious education textbooks in secondary schools in Croatia reveal how much they actually contribute to the goals of religious education in terms of education for intrinsic individual and inter-individual values.