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Religious Education: Good News for Living

Learning area

Rationale

Religious Education is the key learning area for all Catholic and other faith based schools. As a discipline it engages all other learning areas and invites the learner into a personal search for meaning and an exploration of and an exploration of the ultimate questions facing human beings, asked from the point of view of religious faith.

In Tasmanian Catholic schools religious knowledge explores the core Christian beliefs, doctrines, and practices, assisted by the Good News for Living curriculum document (2005). The abilities developed in learners are like those of the core subjects of the Australian Curriculum – English, History and Science – and feature the skills of inquiry and communication. Religious Education also helps students to engage imaginatively, respectfully and critically with the major world religions, spiritual traditions, philosophies and worldviews . By building bonds of genuine friendship between peoples and persons of different religious perspectives, Christian theology promotes respect and cooperation in the building of a more just, sustainable, intelligent, honest and joyful world.

For Religious Education, the core focus is the teachings and example of Jesus Christ and the Church. Our Church doctrine is framed in Good News for Living via eight integrated theological Elements: God, Jesus, Church, Scripture, Sacraments, Prayer, Christian Life and Religion and Society.

As a Key Learning Area, Religious Education is about more than knowledge and the skills of inquiry and communication. It is at once about the exploration of God and our true selves in prayer, spirituality and theology. In the Catholic tradition, theology is an integral part of a journey into wisdom as formative and transformative.The goals of spirituality are ultimately about the people learners can become.

This curriculum, like all profound learning is about the “getting of wisdom”. In the Christian tradition wisdom begins with awe and wonder before the mystery of being and its ultimate meaning in the mystery we call “God”; giving rise to a sense of deep respect (or “reverence”) for all beings, and for life itself, as grounded in God; thereby inculcating a whole-hearted, open-minded and courageous commitment to live as truthfully, justly and creatively as possible in imitation of Christ. It promotes a longing for knowledge that seeks understanding, not just of “truths” of persons, peoples, beings and “Being” itself as the very nature of Truth, thereby draws on both knowledge and understanding in developing the ability to act with discernment, responsibly and joyfully, in a loving relationship with God and one another.

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