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A Review of “Seeking Sense in the City: European Perspectives on Religious Education”

In this recently published collection, Bert Roebben draws on the metaphor of “city” to present his perspectives on the dilemmas of religious education with young people in the shifting and complex currents of postmodern Western society. As a European, he seeks to address these dilemmas for that context and simultaneously to offer his insights, and those of other significant European religious education scholars, to a broader English-speaking audience. That audience includes school teachers, youth and young adult ministers, scholars, church leaders, and all Christians concerned with the question framed decades ago by John Westerhoff, “Will our children have faith?” (1976). The book’s essays were originally published during 1994–2009, and several were revised for the collection. Roebben has arranged them into three major sections: Part I focuses on “Education, Religion, and Values,” where the challenges of moral education and religious education in postmodernity are laid out; Part II emphasizes the school setting (especially in Germany, Flanders, and the Netherlands) and outlines religious education approaches for secondary teachers in the classroom and for their own professional formation; and Part III looks at church-sponsored youth and young adult ministry in the “city.” Several important presumptions ground the author’s approach to religious education with young people. One concerns this developmental phase and its range: Roebben states that while “young adult” formerly connoted ages sixteen through twenty-six, it has recently become a longer and more indeterminate period between childhood and adulthood. In this phase, young people become aware of and participate in the fragmentation and flux of the contemporary world. Here they sample various ways of being a self, greatly influenced by the forces of market and media and yet, in Roebben’s expression, “longing for the homeland”—seeking coherence, meaning and depth for their life projects (191). With the postmodern collapse of “master narratives” and the prevalence of bewildering cultural and religious diversity, social