Educating for a culture of dialogue in religious education
Lecture 1, Thursday, 21.04.2022

Sergio Cicatelli

1. Premise
   There can be at least two ways of approaching the theme of education to a culture of dialogue in religious education (IR): asking how to do it and asking why to do it. The first working hypothesis leads to propose possible school examples of a culture of dialogue and has an essentially didactic purpose, but we will not deal with it here. The second hypothesis can in turn be articulated in two perspectives: asking why one should educate to a culture of dialogue and asking why one can do so; in the first case the school’s aims are at stake, in the second the very nature of the culture of dialogue is at stake and the discourse can become an epistemological research aimed at the theoretical foundation of dialogue in schools and religions.
   
   
   It is above all in the latter perspective that we would like to set out the following reflections, attempting to relate three conceptual poles: dialogue, religion and school. A particular significance of each of these will be highlighted in order to construct a possibly unified path which holds all three concepts together within the specific IR, the nature of which will be kept in mind in a basically universal manner, but with a particularly attentive look at the Italian model, which seems to us capable of offering an effective synthesis. Once the theoretical possibility of dialogue has been established, it will be easy to translate this
   principle into teaching practice.