Reconsidering the Role of Memory in Religious Education

Abstract

This article examines the importance of memory in the Hebrew bible and how memory lay at the center of Ancient Israel's religious faith and cultural identity. It argues for a similar, albeit nuanced, memory-based approach to contemporary Christian religious education. It analyzes memory through the lens of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic of narration and considers ways in which forgetting as well as remembering might play a role in faith formation and identity in the 21st century.

Notes

“There is a covenant of remembrance that is valid for the future and is binding on both sides, and God stands fast: ‘He will not fail you nor will He let you perish; He will not forget the covenant which He made on oath with your fathers.’”

This is not to suggest that recollection is a purely intentional event, since it is composed of unconscious elements that are perhaps best experienced collectively through ritual acts. See Morrill (2000).

“Study, including the kind of constant, unceasing questioning and the rigid sense of logic that pervades the Talmud, became a way of worship. In this complex, the Bible became a revealed text inviting and requiring interpretation, and interpretation was raised to the status of revelation itself.”

Direct scriptural quotations are taken from The Catholic Study Bible: New American Bible, ed. D. Senior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

The account of Jehoram's punishment for unfaithfulness is particularly striking: “and you shall have severe pains from a disease in your bowels, while your bowels issue forth because of the disease, day after day” (2 Chr. 21:15). Jehoram succeeded his father, Jehoshaphat, as king of Judah in 849 BCE. The chronicler notes that he “did evil in the sight of the Lord” (2 Chr. 21:69b) and “departed unloved and was buried in the City of David, but not in the tombs of the kings” (2 Chr. 21:20b).

Sebald warns of an “increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still has some living connection to the past.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Brancatelli

Robert Brancatelli is Adjunct Professor at Fordham University Business Schools and founder of Fordham Road Collaborative. E-mail: [email protected]