Seeking Critical Hope in a Global Age: Religious Education in a Global Perspective

During the last two decades, globalization has come to occupy an important position in popular and academic discourses. Globalization has provided opportunities to produce possibilities of global awareness and at the same time crises to perpetuate a culture of fear. This article asks how church and religious education can provide a global education and help Christians continue to be faithful to their hope for God while engaging others for the common good. This also demands new kinds of global religious education directed toward social justice, cultural unity in diversity, and global responsibility, which can adequately address the challenges of neo-liberalism, fundamentalism, and transnationalism. Based on a dialectical relationship with hope and global education, instead of fear, religious education can be an important enterprise for achieving social justice, maintaining cultural unity in diversity, and equipping citizens with global responsibility, moving toward critical hope in a global age.