Postmodernity, faith and recontextualisation: An agenda for religious educators

During her religious education work with five year olds in her Year 1 class, a teacher in a northern New South Wales Catholic primary school said “Children, Mary is the mother of God”. The response from one child was “But how do you know that?” It is not so much that the child had any idea of the profound epistemological implications of the question. But it is illustrative of the extent of questioning that extends throughout the culture from the five-year-olds to the 90-year-olds that has become a characteristic of what is known as cultural postmodernity. In its extreme, this thinking calls all metanarratives – like the Judaeo-Christian religious story – into question; it tends to imply a cultural agnosticism about religious interpretations of life; it considers that all personal and spiritual knowledge is contextual, individualistic, relative and uncertain – and by implication, unreliable.