From Individual to Corporate Praxis: A Systemic Re-Imagining of Religious Education

When the Religious Education Association (REA) was founded in 1903, its progressivist proponents were already leaning heavily into experiential, participative, and action-oriented education. John Dewey, pragmatist philosopher and a major advocate of learning-by-doing models of education, delivered the REA’s first keynote address and brought many of his progressivist ideas into the shaping of the incipient REA. Similarly, George Albert Coe, also a highly influential co-founder of the REA, championed inductive methods of education and, particularly, of religious education (Boys, 1989, 46-54). Consequently, the initial purpose of the REA reflected the progressivist faith in emerging educational paradigms not only for promoting individual growth but also for transforming society and proposed what David Tracy would later call a “mutually critical correlation ” (1975, 23) between two focal areas: education and religious wisdom traditions. The originating aim of the REA was “To inspire the religious focus of our country with the religious ideal; to inspire the educational forces of our country with the religious ideal; and to keep before the public mind the ideal of moral and religious education and the sense of its need and value ” (REA, 2). Concern for the public dimension of faith life and the culturally transformative potentia