Zen Buddhism: Spiritual Key for Religious Education in a Roman Catholic Way

This essay explores how Zen Buddhism can act as a creative bridge to aid religious educators within a Catholic tradition to better reconcile traditional Catholic teachings with the challenges of religious pluralism. Through Zen’s ordinary, everyday spirituality and appreciation of the paradoxical and more-than-rational, certain Catholic traditions in education can be re-interpreted and more effectively applied to a pluralistic, postmodern world. “Interreligious dialogue must grow out of our common humanity as persons whose sense of what it means to be human expresses itself through different, yet valid and real encounters with the Sacred.