The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny

by Luigi Giussani, Stanley Hauerwas (Foreword by)

Overview

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, “I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say.” Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests. He believed that effective education required an adequate background in the Christian tradition, presented within a lived experience that underscored the capacity of the faith to answer universal questions. What he proposed was a process that allowed one to sift through tradition, critically examining it and comparing it against the ultimate criteria for judgment: the desires of the heart. In Giussani's view, the primary concern was to “educate the human heart as God made it.” In The Risk of Education he states that fear leads students to associate this process of criticism with negativity or doubt. Yet, without an education in criticism, students cannot develop conviction. At a time when young people are abandoning the church and questioning the value of faith, Giussani's method of judging and verifying Christianity as an experience seems a necessary intervention. In The Risk of Education he argues that, ultimately, education and the Christian message reveal themselves through human freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780773557185
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Monsignor Luigi Giussani (1922–2005) was the founder of the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation in Italy. His works are available in over twenty languages and include the trilogy The Religious Sense, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, and Why the Church?, as well as the three volumes of Is It Possible to Live This Way?

Table of Contents

Foreword Stanley Hauerwas vii

Preface xxvii

Introductory thoughts

I A Matter of Method 3

II The Personal Dimension and the Community Dimension 11

III Times and Contexts in Implementing a Method 18

Chapter 1 The Dynamic and Elements of the Educational Event

I Preliminary Observations 25

II Loyalty to "Tradition": The Source of the Capacity for "Certainty" 28

III Authority: The Existentiality of a Proposal 42

IV Personal Verification of the Educational Hypothesis 45

V Risk: A Necessity for Freedom 61

VI Conclusion 65

Chapter 2 Crisis and Dialogue

I The Critical Step 69

II Dialogical Openness 77

III Conclusion 81

Chapter 3 The Structure of Experience 83

Luigi Giussani: A Brief Biography 89

Notes 105

Editorial Reviews

"With Giussani's insights into the psychology of youth, we can trust that the longing for something greater than skills, information, money, and pleasure will continue to animate Catholic education." Commonweal

From the Publisher