Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities

by John Van Engen

Foreword by Dorothy C. Bass / A much-needed addition to the emerging literature on the formative power of religious practices, Educating People of Faith creates a vivid portrait of the lived practices that shaped the faith of Jews and Christians in synagogues and churches from antiquity up to the seventeenth century. / This significant book is the work of Jewish, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant scholars who wished to discover and describe how Jews and Christians through history have been formed in religious ways of thinking and acting. Rather than focusing solely on either intellectual or social life, the authors all use the concept of "practices" as they attend to the embodied, contextual character of religious formation. Their studies of religious figures, community life, and traditional practices such as preaching, sacraments, and catechesis are colorful, detailed, and revealing. The authors are also careful to cover the nature of religious education across all social levels, from the textual formation of highly literate rabbis and monks engaged in Scripture study to the local formation of illiterate medieval Christians for whom the veneration of saints' shrines, street performances of religious dramas, and public preaching by wandering preachers were profoundly formative. / Educating People of Faith will benefit scholars and teachers desiring a fuller perspective on how lived practices have historically formed people in religious faith. It will also be useful to practical theologians and pastors who wish to make the resources of the past available to practitioners in the present.

Genres: Theology, Education

368 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

John H. Van Engen is an American historian, and Andrew V. Tackes Professor of Medieval History, at Notre Dame University. He is a 1984 Guggenheim Fellow, and 2011 Berlin Prize Fellow. He won the 2010 Otto Gründler Book Prize, and John Gilmary Shea Prize.

Reviews

[Scott Hughes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting read. I wish it was more targeted or perhaps its trajectory would have been towards what churches today could learn from our history. That information can be gleaned from the different essays in part, but I wish there had been a concluding chapter that would have drawn those strains together with a local church in mind instead of spiritual direction in general.