Philippine E-Journals

Religious Education and Religious Studies

Bob Bonifacio

Discipline: Education, Religion

 

Abstract:

Religious Education 'is a life-long process that takes place in the larger society and involves every individual and every aspect of human existence. Religious Education does not need to have an academically religious character for it to be both essentially and existentially religious. For every aspect of human experience which translates itself into consciousness and behavior in a way .that reveals the depth and variety of human existence is religious in character even in the strict sense of the word.

 

Religious Studies, however, is principally concerned with the academically religious character of human experience. Religious Studies is only a part of Religious Education but is an integral part. This is because in human experience, historically, an element of mystery always comes in and incarnates itself in a form which we can only call, for lack of a better term, supernatural in character. Such mystery holds a claim to a specific type of conceptualization, expression and transmission which, again for lack of a better term-, we call religious expression.