Thursday, May 29, 2014

Caputo on secular and religious education

From this IPS post:

I read the beginning of this Caputo interview this morning discussing the secular and the religious in terms of education. He thinks education should remain secular when defined as the political prohibition on "supporting a particular confessional religion" (1). But he thinks the university should not be secular if that means removing the religious impulse (2). Though he differentiates the latter with confessional religion and defines it as a religion of the "event," described as follows:


"I mean it in Derrida’s sense of the coming of something we cannot see coming, the coming of the unexpected, unprojected, unprogrammed, which of course we hope will make everything new but may make everything worse. With the coming of the event, things are reopened, reinvented, undergo a paradigm shift, a new being, and this happens everywhere, in history and everyday life, in philosophy, in art, in science. [...] Of course, we cannot make events happen—we cannot even see them coming. But we can prepare the conditions under which they happen by keeping things relatively unstable, in a state of optimal disequilibrium, not too much but enough, and this requires judgment and discernment" (2).

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