DAYAP, Alberto Luis B.

Article Review
APL2 Thed03

Article Reading: “Pluralism Towards Authentic Communion” (see Scientia vol. 4.2
@scientia-sanbeda.org)

Theology and religious education can stand with the challenges of contemporary
reality of a pluralized world and the challenges of Fundamentalism and Relativism by
being open to different people with different religious beliefs. Although still upholding the
church’s religious values, Religions must be an open community in a sense that it
promotes people’s own values regardless of their different opinions and beliefs, But not
by forcing people to a particular religion because as we see in the given article, It can
cause issues regarding the Fundamentalism caused by the natural nature of one’s own
belief/s.

According to the article, Dialogue is important when Religions wants to stand with
the challenges of Fundamentalism and Relativism, In creating dialogue, they can do it
by promoting religious education or community to the people. In creating a genuine
Religious Education, a critical commitment to one’s faith tradition and a critical
openness to other religious traditions must be included. By creating and formulating a
community of openness to other types of religious groups, a person is removed of his
safeguarded exclusivism, to stand with the other and even to become vulnerable before
the other, for this is the way to see God’s image in the other, even as one affirms it in
oneself.

The implementation of creating a community with openness to other religious

groups should not be done through strict methods like teachings of dogmatic absolutes
no, but it must be done in a sort of discussion of ideas on how to improve a community,
help people, solve societal problems, injustices etc. In this way, not only does religions
balance out the indiferrences brought by different religious groups throughout the world
but it also promotes the values of the church that it wants to teach or deliver, which is
helping people and uniting people through God, whatever God is called in different
religions.

It gives an opportunity for other people to express their shared opinions not
through self centered faiths but through the experiences or relatable problems that they
DAYAP, Alberto Luis B. Article Review
APL2 Thed03

may have. Like for example, having interreligious dialogue that focuses on life-giving
values or issues like peace and justice, human rights and sustainable environment.
Religions will always divide people’s beliefs BUT the education’s purpose is to unite and
uplift the participants to come up with a solution that is morally acceptable to the society
and in a way helps the world become better through understanding and compassion
brought by the religion’s openness to the different Religions around the globe while at
the same time, embracing the other as one’s own. This is what it means to have a
genuine dialogue, a communion, and it begins with compassion. It is when the sharing
of religious teachings that personal experience of a believer to his religion comes out.
This is when we say that a dialogue with another tradition is a dialogue with oneself
also. A community where people gather together around the church depicts the content
and nourishment Religious Education seeks to prepare and serve that is, the education
for life.