Category Archives: Religious education

Teaching kids how to be religious, part three

Part one: Link

In my own religious tradition of Unitarian Universalism, we made a fundamental mistake in the way we teach kids how to be religious. Back in the 1930’s, the Unitarians and the Universalists hired Sophia Lyon Fahs as their curriculum editor, and over the next two decades Fahs produced a brilliant series of curriculum textbooks. Brilliant books like The Church across the Street, which introduced junior high students to other Protestant traditions, attracted well-deserved attention beyond the Unitarians and the Universalists. The Fahs curriculum books were, in their own way, works of genius.

But an earlier book co-written by Fahs reveals one of her fundamental limitations as a religious educator. Exploring Religion with Eight Year Olds (1930), written by Fahs and co-author Helen Sweet Firman, tells the story of one Sunday school class over the course of a year, through a teacher’s journal and careful analysis of that journal. It, too, is a brilliant book, well worth reading even today; today’s religious educators can still learn from the progressive educational philosophy and pedagogy, the assessment techniques, the tradition of close observation of individual children.

Yet something is fundamentally wrong with the book:– the Sunday school class described in the book is a closely-graded class in a laboratory Sunday school that is not affiliated with any congregation, or even with any specific religious tradition. Fahs had completely divorced children’s religious education from the traditional multi-generational institutions of congregations and wider religious traditions. The children are influenced by each other, by their own inner thoughts and memories and inclinations, and by their teacher; it is an extreme form of individualism, which works pretty well but which leaves out big chunks of religion.

Fahs was not the only one trying to take religious education in this direction. The Universalist Angus MacLean was headed in the same direction, and in his book A New Age in Religious Education he tells churches to take the kids out of the worship service and drop them into closely graded Sunday school classrooms that look exactly like public school classrooms. That was the trend throughout liberal religion and mainline Protestantism in the mid- to late-20th C.: separate the kids from the adults, to the end that the individual development of individual children is nurtured and encouraged.

This was a brilliant idea, but it didn’t really work. Religious educators within liberal religion, and Christian educators within mainline Protestantism began to notice that once kids grew up, they didn’t stick around. “Oh well,” we said, “kids just naturally drift away when they’re in their twenties.” Liberal religion and mainline Protestantism began to decline in numbers, due in no small part to the fact that 80% or 90% of our kids drifted away and never came back.

We said this was “natural,” while turning a blind eye to the fact that other religious groups, like the Mormons, managed to hang on to a higher percentage of their kids. “Oh no,” we said, “we don’t want to be coercive like the Mormons, we don’t want to force our kids to stay in our religious tradition.” We ignored the fact that we were actively training our kids into an extreme individualism that encouraged them, even forced them, to leave us.

We also conveniently ignored the fact that our religious education was built on a deep-held assumption that we really didn’t want our kids to stick around. I had been an active youth leader in my church in my teens. When I tried to go back to my home church in my mid-20’s, I found there wasn’t a place for me. Indeed, I was subtly but actively discouraged from attending church:– many people ignored me at worship services, I was never invited to join a social group or a committee, it was made quite clear that there was no place for a single, childless young man in his early twenties in that church. The idea of closely-graded classes went beyond the Sunday school up into the adult religious community, and there was no “class” for twenty-somethings.

Fortunately for me, a few people like Hrand and Toby and Doug and Kay made sure I felt welcome; and my parents let me join their ushering team so at least I had some role in the church. Hrand, Toby, Doug, and Kay ignored the precepts of “lifespan faith development,” which seems to predict that twenty-somethings will go off and explore other religions. They, and others like them, realized that there were young adults who wanted to belong to that church. Intuitively, they also realized that some of us desperately needed the distributed cognitions built into that church, to help us deal with what was going on in our individual lives.

Contrary to the precepts of developmentalism, not everyone fits into a closely-graded religious education class. Not everyone thrives by being limited to contact solely with other persons of his or her own age. Given that we lose up to 90% of our young people, I’d hazard a guess that most people do not thrive under the precepts of “lifespan faith development.”

To be continued…

Teaching kids how to be religious, part two

Part one: Link

Here in North America and Western Europe, we have been wholly seduced by Jean Piaget’s understanding of persons. Piaget saw children as little scientists, investigating their worlds as solitary researchers, gradually building up adequate models of how the world works. One of Piaget’s insights is that children develop their little models according to a timetable that is more or less the same for every child. Thus the role of adults is to help children work through the standard development schedule.

Piaget’s insights are extraordinarily useful in classroom settings (although it should be noted that classrooms have been set up according to Piaget’s notions, so there may be something of a tautology here). But in Eastern Europe, Lev Vygotsky came up with another possible insight into how children learn and “develop.”

Living in Russia in the early 20th C., Vygotsky was deeply affected by ideas of collective human endeavor. The West reviled Karl Marx and glorified the extreme individualism of free market capitalism; Eastern Europe and Russia reviled capitalism and glorified collectivism. Unlike Piaget, who was from Western Europe and saw human beings as disparate individuals, Vygotsky saw human beings as part of a collective.

Needless to say, Vygotsky’s research was utterly rejected by the West until the fall of Marxism in Eastern Europe. This was unfortunate, because while much of Vygotsky’s research is now outdated, he did discover one very important thing:– children can perform above their expected level of competence in certain social settings.

In my own work as a religious educator, I have found both Piaget and Vygotsky help me to understand how children learn to be religious. Children do change and develop in certain fairly predictable patterns as they grow older, just as Piaget’s model predicts. At the same time, when you put together a group of children of mixed ages, the younger children can perform above their developmental stage, due to the influence of the older children. The same is true for children who are in a multi-generational setting, such as in all-ages worship services (for example, school age children in certain unprogrammed Quaker meetings can and will sit in silence for the first twenty minutes of meeting for worship).

In the past twenty years, some psychologists in the West have gone beyond Vygotsky’s work, and developed a theory of “distributed cognition.” In this theory, cognition or thinking is distributed through out socially-created objects and institutions. A concrete example of a distributed cognition is an axe:– when you pick up an axe, you are holding the accumulated cognitive insights into how to cut down trees, accumulated by generations of human beings. Yes, someone has to teach you how to use that axe, but there’s a sense in which the axe also teaches you; there’s a sense in which as you learn to use the axe, you gain access to the accumulated wisdom of generations of thinkers.

I still use Piaget’s insights into human beings. But when it comes to teaching kids how to be religion, I also use the insights of distributed cognition. Like an axe, a congregation represents the accumulated wisdom of a certain religious tradition. This is another way of getting at what religious educator Maria Harris said:– curriculum isn’t just what’s written in the text books in the Sunday school, the whole congregation is the curriculum.

To be continued…

Teaching kids how to be religious

The very title of this little essay is an absurdity. You don’t teach kids how to be religious, because they already are religious. At least they’re more or less religious, depending on their personalities:– some of them are already quite advanced religiously by the time they’re seven, while others (as the philosopher Richard Rorty admits of himself) are “religiously tone-deaf.”

Absurdity though it may be, I’m forced to talk about how to teach kids to be religious because my denomination, and much of institutionalized religion generally, believes that that’s what you do. My denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association, has a department called “Lifespan Faith Development.” They want to “develop” kids, just like real estate developers “develop” old farms or woodlots or deserts into housing developments and shopping malls, because houses and malls are the “highest and best use” of the land.

“Lifespan Faith Development” has another fatal flaw:– it uses the term “faith development” as an integral part of its name. “Faith development” was conjured up by James Fowler, and still has a following amongst older male psychologists who began their careers when Fowler first published his book and who still try to do research on how faith develops, psychologically speaking. Problem is, Fowler never adequately defined what he meant by “faith.” To make matters worse, his model posits a highest stage of faith development for which his research found only one representative person; hardly an adequate sample size on which to base an adequate theory.

Still worse, Fowler basically reduces “faith development” to cognitive (and maybe affective) development, ignoring such things as the transcendental experiences which burst in on you unannounced changing you forever in a discontinuous fashion that has nothing to do with his orderly linear “faith development”; ignoring such things as certain slow dragging years of no transcendence which can suck all religion out of you if you’re not careful. But if you really want to know about why faith development doesn’t work, you can read Gabriel Moran’s essays on the topic.

Worst of all, I believe the term “lifespan faith development” allows us to delegate teaching kids to someone else in our religious communities. “Lifespan faith development” implies that you have to know some arcane theories about “faith development” in order to teach kids. “Lifespan faith development” means you should rely on the experts to set up scientific programs for teaching kids. That term allows us to abdicate our responsibility to our children.

Yet it is you and I, not some expert, who teach children how to be religious. And we do teach children how to be religious, regardless of the theory we espouse. Or rather, we don’t teach them how to be religious, we teach them how to handle the religion they already have. We do that in a way that flies in the face of typical Western understandings of the psychological underpinnings of religion, and persons, and faith.

To be continued…

Water

With the heavy rains last night, everything in the woods was soaked. We had planned an activity where the third and fourth graders would be crawling around on the ground, but it was too wet for that.

As we walked over to the Grove, we passed a running stream of water that had been a dry ditch yesterday. I said: Let’s clean out some of these sticks so the water flows better. Some of the active boys jumped down and started pulling out sticks and even small logs. The girls and other boys weren’t far behind. We dropped sticks and and watched how fast they raced downstream.

I asked: Where does the water go? “Down there!” Let’s follow it and see. They all ran off downstream, stopping to clean out a few more snags. “It flows into this hole!” That’s called a culvert. “It keeps going over here!” We ran over to a ditch by the side of the main road. The children discovered that the water seemed to disappear under the road.

We carefully crossed the road to see if we could follow the water down to the ocean, but there was no water on the ditch on the other side of the road. We crossed back over to look again. Where does the water go? The children imagined all kinds of things that might happen to the water. But what really happens to the water? Who could we ask? The children thought about that, and one of the children who has returned year after year said, “We could talk to the guy who runs the campsite.” So we walked over to the garage, where we found Ed.

I said, Ed, the children want to know where the water goes. Ed explained that it runs into a sewer under the road, and then is pumped up to the sewage treatment plant where they process the water to make it clean. “They take all the poop out of it!” “Yes,” said Ed, “and at the end the water is so clean that you can drink it.” That was a novel concept to the children, and we talked about that for a while. Then it was time to follow the water upstream, to see where it came from. “Thank you, Ed!”

We ran back to the stream, and followed it the other direction this time. “I know where streams start, they always start in a spring in the mountains.” Well, let’s see how far we can follow this stream.

We came to a place where the bottom of the stream was sand. The sand looked orange. The children and I pulled sand up off the bottom, but when we pulled it up the sand was white. That means the water is orange: why? “It’s the leaves, they make it orange.” “And the pine needles.”

The stream got wider and wider, and flowed more and more slowly. Soon there were interconnected puddles everywhere in the woods — in the same part of the woods where we had walked dry shod yesterday. I suggested that maybe the stream started with all the puddles. But the children weren’t yet sure. So we kept going deeper into the woods.

“We should go this way!” said one child. “No, this way!” said another child. I asked, Which way does water flow? “Up–” “No, it flows downhill.” So which way is uphill? We figured out which way was uphill, and went that way to see if we could tell where the water started flowing. There was water everywhere. If you slipped on a root, you’d get wet. All of us got our feet at least a little bit wet.

Finally we got to a place where there were no more puddles. But there was no stream, either. Finally the children figured out what was going on: The woods turn into a swamp when it rains, and the streams drain the water out of the stream. I told them that the streams were actually ditches that people had dug in order to drain the swamp.

We stood in a circle, and went over what we had figured out. At the end of that, one child said, “I think we should always learn like this — being outdoors, and not having someone just tell us.” I said that I believed that children could figure things out for themselves (with adult help and direction).

It was time to head back. I said I’d try to find a dryer path for us to follow back. But there was water everywhere. Eventually, we had to turn around and head back the way we came. We got a little wetter, and we were fifteen minutes late for lunch. But the children had learned a lot more about the woods, and water, and what happens when it rains, and where water goes. They’ve learned about the water cycle in school, but this time they really got to see it in action.

And this was completely unplanned: spontaneous programming, arising out of the interests of the children, and their interactions with their surrounding environment.

Alone in the woods

Today we had the 5/6th graders for nature and ecology in the hour just before lunch. “What are we going to do today?” “Can we do alone time again?” “Yeah, where we walk single file and you tap us on the shoulder.” “Yeah, and spread us out so we can’t see each other this time!” [See below for instructions of how we set up alone time two days ago.] Alone time wasn’t on our lesson plan for today, but since one of our primary learning goals is to have the children spend time alone in the woods, Lisa and I were actually very pleased that they asked to do more alone time.

So we said: Sure, we can do alone time again. Do you want to do it as long as half an hour? “Longer!” “Yeah, the whole hour!” Well, we can’t go that long because we have to be at lunch by noon. “OK, but be sure to spread us out so far that we can’t see each other.” Then a worried look: “What if something happens, though?” Well, Lisa and I will spread you out so you can just see each other.

We actually let them go a little longer than thirty minutes. Then I asked what they did with their alone time. Some of them couldn’t quite spend that whole time alone and six of the eleven children wound up hanging out with a nearby child: “We built a fort together,” said one pair. Of the ones who spent the whole time alone, some spent time just looking at what was around them: “I wound up in exactly the same spot as the last time, so I finished looking at the things I started looking at last time we had alone time.” One or two just sat and enjoyed being quiet: “I just sat there on the ground and didn’t really do anything.” I mentioned that being alone in the outdoors is one of my spiritual practices (just so they would know that it can be a legitimate spiritual practice).

Later today, one of the girls in that group made a point of stopping me and saying that she really liked being alone in the woods. Don’t let anyone tell you that kids today only want to play video games.

*****

Alone time (with a group of children)

Give these instructions before beginning: “We’re all going to keep walking single file along the trail. One at a time, the Sweep will indicate to each child that he/she is to sit down in the trail, until everyone is spread out along the trail. Then we’ll all sit in silence of a time. When the time is up, the Sweep will start walking slowly, slowly, and gradually we’ll rejoin in a single file line again.” Sweep circles back around to be at rear of line again. Have children sit in silence for one to five minutes (depending on age and group chemistry). Older children can spread out quite far. Younger children will be more comfortable if they are closer together.

More eco-teaching

Religious Education Week, Ferry Beach Conference Center

Today we had the fifth and sixth graders first. We played the “Foxes, Rabbits, and Leaves” game that we did yesterday with the third and fourth graders — I learned from yesterday’s mistakes, and the game went much more smoothly today. After half an hour of play, the children didn’t want to stop, but Lisa and I eneded that game anyway because we wanted to give them some alone time in the woods.

So we lined them up single file, and walked out into the woods. One by one, Lisa seated each child along the trail, so they were all spread out — within sight of one another, but too far away too talk. After about seven minutes of quiet time, Lisa and I circled around and picked the children up one by one, and we all walked back single file, in silence, to a comfortable place in the woods, where we sat in a circle.

I asked: What did you do with you time alone in the woods?

“I picked up a big stick and I hit it against a tree again and again until it broke.”

“I sat and meditated for a while, then I opened my eyes and looked around.”

“I let an inch worm crawl on me, but then I squished it by mistake so I buried it.”

“I picked up a big stick and hit it again a tree too.”

“I swatted mosquitoes. Oh, and I listened to a bird that was nearby.”

I said: I love to spend time outdoors, and I’ve done all those things myself.

One of our goals is to give each group plenty of unstructured time more or less alone in the woods. A big part of our goal is to help children feel comfortable outdoors, in a natural environment — we want kids to like Nature and the outdoors. If they feel some spiritual connection with Nature, great, but just liking it is enough at this point.

When things really soar

Here at the annual religious education conference at Ferry Beach Conference Center, I’m one of the adults leading the children’s program. Along with Lisa, I’m doing nature and ecology with the elementary age children. At the end of the morning today, we had the third and fourth graders for an hour. The plan was to play a game for half an hour that would teach about cycles of life, and then going out into the woods and giving the children some alone time. As can happen with children, we went astray from the plan.

The children were feeling active today. We started playing the game, called “Foxes and Rabbits,” and the children got so excited and were having so much fun I had trouble getting them to transition from one round to the next. I didn’t want them to descend from excitement into chaotic lack of structure, so I really worked hard to get them to stay focused. I was getting a little frustrated with them. Fortunately, they’re a cheerful group so they tried hard focus a little more even though they were getting a little frustrated with me. It was one of those teaching situations where the children were pulling in one direction, and I was pulling in slightly different direction.

But we were all having fun, in spite of the frustration. I looked at my watch and fifty minutes had gone by — we had to wrap things up pretty quickly. So I asked the children to sit in a circle, and we talked about the game. And they came up with some wonderful insights about the cycle of life, about what might happen if humans destroy part of the web of life, about birth and death, just a wonderful free-for-all discussion. It was one of those times you sometimes get while teaching:– with the whole group, kids and adults, soaring together.

Fifty minutes of frustration for ten minutes of soaring. That’s the way it goes in teaching.

*****

If you’re curious, below are the rules to the game. It’s both simple and really quite complex, and part of the frustration we all experienced was my inability to explain the game quickly and concisely.

Game: “Foxes and Rabbits” adapted from Steve van Matre’s book Acclimatizing

Divide the group into Foxes, Rabbits, and Leaves. (If you have a group of ten, a good proportion would be 4 rabbits, 3 leaves, and 3 foxes.) Give the Rabbits tails (pieces of white cloth to stick into back pocket).

The Rabbits start out crouched down in the middle. The Foxes start out in a loose circle around the Rabbits. The Leaves stand (with their hands in the air so everyone knows they are Leaves) in a loose circle outside the Foxes.

Each round begins when a signal is given. During each round, the Rabbits try to “eat” (tag) the Leaves. The Foxes try to catch and “eat” the Rabbits (by pulling tail). The Leaves are are rooted in place and cannot move.

During each round, Rabbits are safe and cannot be tagged when they are frozen in a crouched position. However, the Rabbits may not move or “eat” Leaves unless they are standing up. Each Rabbit must get food in each round, or s/he will die from hunger. Each Fox, too, must get food in each round or s/he will die from hunger. A Fox may only catch ONE Rabbit each round.

The round should last no more than five minutes, or when all the Leaves are eaten. The Leader calls out “End of Round!”, all play stops, and then you tally up those who got eaten or who starved to death:

  • LEAVES:
  • If a Leaf is eaten by a Rabbit, in the next round she becomes a Rabbit.
  • (All other Leaves remain Leaves.)
  • RABBITS:
  • If a Rabbit is eaten by a Fox, in the next round she becomes a Fox.
  • If a Rabbit is does not manage to eat a Leaf during a round, he “dies” and becomes a Leaf.
  • (All other Rabbits remain Rabbits.)
  • FOXES:
  • If a Fox fails to catch a Rabbit within the round, he “dies” and becomes a Leaf.
  • (All other Foxes remain Foxes.)

Play three to five rounds (or more, if it’s going well).

General Assembly, day four

I just went over to the Ware lecture. I’d estimate there are 4,000 people in the hall listening to Mary Oliver read her poetry: a nice, intimate little reading. Not being particularly fond of crowds to begin with, I decided I’d be better off sitting here in the webworkers’ room watching the lecture on my laptop via streamed video. The reality is that I can see and hear better here than I could there.

Annabelle’s daughter just popped her head in to say “hi” from Anabelle. Annabelle is a webworker who couldn’t join us this year. We invited her daughter and her friend to watch and listen to Mary Oliver with us. So we’re having our own little poetry reading about three hundred yards from the real Ware lecture.

*****

Went to a difficult and dramatic workshop today: “Race, Youth, and General Assembly: What We’ve Learned,” a presentation by the Special Review Commission that was appointed by the denomination’s Board of Trustees following the racial incidents at last year’s General Assembly. Since I’ve been assigned to write up this workshop for the Unitarian Universalist Association Web site, I’ll let you read my report once it is edited and placed online [Link to come]. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty — sort of like when you turn over a rock and all the creepy-crawlie things skitter away from the light. Yup, the Special Review Commission has turned over the big rock of racism within Unitarian Universalism, and it isn’t pretty to look at.

*****

Dinner with Niko, the one other member of the New Bedford church besides me to be at General Assembly. He told me about the big outdoor solstice ritual that the pagan group held today. And how did they find a suitable outdoor space in downtown St. Louis within walking distance of the convention center? They used the satellite photos in Google Maps, and found a perfect little green space. There was even a grassy circle within a grove of trees.

*****

Long talk with Craig late this afternoon. I had double-scheduled my first meeting with him and had to cancel, but we each managed to squeeze another hour out of our General Assembly schedules so we could sit and chat. He had me in stitches, laughing at stories of the Red Queen, the poker games, and other people and events that shall remain anonymous. It’s always fun to talk with Craig; my only disappointment was that Cheryl, Craig’s sweetie, couldn’t join us.

While we were talking, we each took two cell phone calls, final arrangements for other meetings we had with other people. The real problem with General Assembly is that there just isn’t enough time to talk with all the people you want to talk with.

*****

Most of today I have spent writing. This is the real joy of General Assembly for me: going to events and workshops, making some kind of sense out of those events, and turning them into serviceable prose. But there’s not much I can tell you about that.

Self-esteem is not a panacea

My partner Carol brought home the Winter, 2005, number of Stanford Social Innovation Review, which seems aimed at people like me: “…Stanford Social Innovation Review presents the best in research- and practice-based knowledge to help the people who do the important work of improving society do it even better.” An awkward sentence, but a goal that intrigues me.

If, like many of my readers, you work in a socially responsible job that makes you feel “burned out,” you will want to read the article on “Reversing Burnout,” which is available for free online [link]. It’s a good article, but I was even more interested in an article titled “Rethinking self-esteem: Why non-profits should stop pushing self-esteem and start endorsing self-control,” by Roy Baumeister.

I know I have been losing any interest in promoting self-esteem in my work as a minister. It has seemed to me that promoting self-esteem never gets you anywhere; in spite of the seeming consensus among psychologists, gaining additional self-esteem doesn’t seem to solve any other human problems. In a review of relevant academic literature, Baumeister found that in fact promoting self-esteem can be counterproductive:

…[S]everal close analyses of the accumulated research have shaken many psychologists’ faith in self-esteem. My colleagues and I were commissioned to conduct one of these studies by the American Psychological Society, an organization devoted to psychological research. These studies show not only that self-esteem fails to accomplish what we had hoped, but also that it can backfire and contribute to some of the very problems it was thought to thwart. Social sector organizations should therefore reconsider whether they want to dedicate their scarce resources to cultivating self-esteem. In my view, there are other traits, like self-control, that hold much more promise. [p. 36]

Baumeister’s review of relevant research finds that Americans routinely test very high for self-esteem, and indeed that we “overrate and overvalue ourselves.” Nor do researchers find that traditionally marginalized groups — e.g., African Americans and women — score significantly lower on self-esteem measures. Problems like racism and sexism do not seem to have a strong link to self-esteem

In another example, correlations between self-esteeem and good grades are merely correlations, not causal relationships, says Baumeister:

…a review of more than 100 studies with more than 200,000 students as subjects confirmed that there is a positive correlation between self-esteem and school performance.

While these findings fueled the belief that high self-esteem leads to good grades, many scientists were skeptical. Most people who deal with statistics know that just because A and B are correlated does not mean that A causes B….

[Social scientists] found that students’ self-esteem rose after getting good grades and fell after getting bad grades. In contrast, they did not find that people’s grades improved after their self-esttem rose, nor did they find that people’s grades dropped after their self-esteem fell. In other words, good grades were the horse and self-esteem was the cart, not the other way around….

If self-esteem is a result, not a cause, of good schoolwork, then enhancing self-esteem is a waste of time in the pursuit of better classroom performance….

Baumeister’s review of the relevant literature also turned up some other interesting things: self-esteem doesn’t lead to better interpersonal relationships; lack of self-esteem does not lead to violence (instead, “most aggressors have high opinions of themselves”); narcissists do not suffer from low self-esteem on the inside; there is “no relationship between self-esteem and early onset of sexual behavior”; alcohol and drug use are not linked to self-esteem.

I am actually relieved to hear all this; as I said earlier, it confirms what I have already suspected. I know some people have felt that curriculum units on self-esteem were appropriate for children’s religious education, but I never felt self-esteem was worth teaching in Sunday school (no, not even in OWL classes). I know people feel that one goal of pastoral counseling is to bolster self-esteem, but I have believed that the purpose of holding someone in “unconditional positive regard” is to inculcate hope and lead persons towards forgiveness.

Instead of self-esteem, Baumeister advocates promoting self-control:

[S]elf-control can actually help one become a better person, as opposed to just regarding oneself as a better person. Indeed, self-control sounds a lot like what people used to call character: the ability to live up to goals and ideals, to resist temptations, to honor obligations, and to follow through on difficult tasks and projects. [p. 41]

We might see a distinct rise in productivity of church committees if we stopped promoting self-esteem and started promoting self-control. However, I am wary about jumping on some self-control bandwagon. I prefer to take a non-reductionistic view of human life: we must strive to be well-rounded, whole beings. Such a wholistic view will continue to guide my thinking about religious education and pastoral care.

In any case, a very provocative article from Stanford Social Innovation Review — a journal which I suspect I will find myself reading regularly.