On the other end of the spectrum, religious education often has been justified with arguments from authority and tradition.
While statements like these are not wrong, failing to dig deeper into them with follow-up questions like “Why is God good?” “How is God good?” or “What does ‘good’ mean?” does a gross injustice to their richness and depth. When nebulous, religious education is described as having the extremely vague goal of simply “growing closer to God.” Under this approach, theology becomes the “easy-A” course in grade school and parish education programs, where general statements like “Jesus is love” or “God is good” suffice for outstanding work. For many, religious education has been on the one hand too nebulous and vague or, on the other hand, overly authoritative. It seems their negative experiences of theology stem from two opposite poles. In our conversations there is nearly universal agreement that when religion class is reduced to religious information, it has 1) made them feel worse about themselves rather than better, 2) made them feel farther from God rather than closer and 3) caused them to think that faith is foolish and anti- reason, rather than thought-provoking and life-giving. I teach freshmen who have come primarily from Catholic grade schools and parish religion programs. But in that time I have come to realize that many students have an overwhelmingly negative view of religion class. I have been teaching theology in a formal setting for only three years. Yet it is often difficult to get students engaged in theology, much less excited about it.
Thomas Aquinas held that happiness is one of the foundational characteristics of the mind’s assent to God, and in this light theology is a discipline in which we seek not only to understand but ultimately to attain happiness. In one way or other, every Catholic high school offers just this type of class-only we call it theology. One would expect a class on happiness to be fairly popular among high school students.
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