THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: REFLECTIONS ON A GIFT TO RELIGIOUS EDUCATORS

Religious Education, Fall 2004 by Durka, Gloria

First impressions can last a long time, even more than thirty years. So it is with my first encounter with James Fowlers theory of faith development. On a crisp autumn morning in the fall of 1973, a colleague from Boston College and I set out for Fitchburg, Massachusetts to attend a day-long working seminar at the invitation of James Fowler. We were joined by other colleagues from the religious education faculty of the Boston Theological Institute. At the meeting, we were introduced to the research on faith development that Fowler and his staff were conducting, and we spent the better part of our time together teasing out the enormous implications that were already apparent in this exciting new work. It was indeed a privilege to be present for this part of the theory's birthing process. To say that a spirit of enthusiasm enfolded the group is to almost understate the recognition we had that Fowler and his team "were on to something big." As the only Catholic religious educator in the group, I found myself spinning ideas of what this new theory could mean for those Catholic school teachers and administrators who were so enticed by the work of Lawrence Kohlberg. Perhaps no other religious body embraced Kohlberg's ideas more enthusiastically, and alas, sometimes more uncritically, than did the Catholics. Lawrence Kohlberg was a featured speaker at major meetings of Catholic educators, and distillations of his work appeared in Catholic journals and professional magazines. Publishing houses swiftly put out teachers manuals, student workbooks, and filmstrips on moral development. Students and teachers alike were soon busily engaged in "staging" people s moral development by analyzing their responses to moral dilemmas. Who, among those teachers, would not recognize the lifeboat or Heinz dilemmas? All of this, even as Kohlberg cautioned educators against such uncritical and often simplistic applications of his theory. But, at the same time, there was a felt need among many to better understand how children, youth, and adults developed morally and spiritually. While Robert Bellah and his colleagues were readying a scathing commentary on the loss of community in the United States, there were those who were probing the inner workings of the human spirit, so as to enhance educational and pastoral responses to the hungers of the heart. The setting was ripe for what Fowler and his team were about to share.

When the staff of what was then known as the Institute for Religious Education and Service at Boston College introduced a weekend course for graduate students, John R. McCall, S.J., Director, insisted that we offer courses by persons who were at the cutting edge of their disciplines. James Fowler was among the very first to be invited. I still can recall the riveting attention of those in that first class on stages of faith development that he gave to a crowd of eager students. Later, when comparing notes with my colleague, Maria Harris, who was teaching at Andover Newton Theological School, we both agreed that the religious educators and pastoral ministers we had in our classes were deeply hungry for what Fowler was proposing in his work. After having both taught in a variety of settings and grade levels from kindergarten through university, and after having given numerous workshops to teachers all over the country, we had more than a hunch about this theory-we experienced an openhearted receptivity among the students. Our students were among those who copied and sent notes and handouts from Fowler s courses to colleagues all over the world. And when he became a "regular" at the Boston College Summer Institute, we both had the privilege of engaging him in "hard" conversations. So it was especially gratifying for me to be a participant in the international seminar convened in 1987 by Karl Emst Nipkow and Friedrich Schweitzer at the University of Tubingen, in which religious educators and researchers presented papers on limitations and possibilities of faith development theory from a variety of perspectives. It was amazing to realize that in such a short span of time, Fowlers theory of developmental stages had exerted wide influence in North America, and was already then becoming known in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Australia. Translations of his writing abounded. So, too, did critical discussion.

In his current essay for Religious Education, Fowler cites what he considers to be some major contributions of faith development research and theory to religious education, which I think can readily be affirmed by most of us who work in the field. In addition, I would cite Fowler's consistent emphasis on the necessity and significance of conversation among religious communities. Throughout his research, Fowler has had to acknowledge its plurality and ambiguity. His willingness to engage in conversation with critics and supporters has allowed him to present to us a "common" language, so as to allow experiences to be shared, validated, and questioned. By doing so, he illustrates that there is no final and definitive theory of development and no final synthesis that encompasses all human experience, criticizes what is oppressive, and appropriates what is usable in all religious traditions. That work must be ongoing, as the current world situation sharply reveals. For those of us engaged in teaching and research, Fowler s work throughout these thirty years reminds us of the reconstructive nature of theory-building itself, which is faithful to the quest for greater adequacy and appropriateness, to use Tracy's terms (Tracy 1975). This is no small part of the gift that the theory gives to us. Aspects of this gift can be seen in Fowlers discussion here of the central divider between religious educators who embrace faith development with few reservations and those who have strong resistance, namely, "FDT's [Faith Development Theory] effort to define faith in a functional and structural form that can be inclusive of the dynamics of faith in many traditions, and even for some persons or groups who hold secular ideologies" (this issue). Through these thirty years, Fowler has argued (at sometimes more forcibly than at others) that religious educators should not merely use FDT to enable stage advancement, but to help us "shape our teaching and involvement with members of faith traditions." He reiterates that "movement in stage development, properly understood, is a byproduct of teaching the substance and the practices of faith." Yet, too often, this distinction has been lost by those who employ and/or resist the theory in spite of Fowler's caveats.