https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/15375 Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:06:28 GMT 2026-09-28T09:06:28Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/149461 Title: Beyond information : wisdom, human judgment, and catholic religious education in the age of generative AI Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) intensifies a long-standing question for religious education (RE): what is education for when information, explanation, and polished synthesis are available on demand? Using Catholic religious education (CRE) as a situated case, this conceptual article argues that wisdom should orient RE without displacing knowledge. Drawing on virtue ethics, Catholic thought, philosophy of education, and recent scholarship on digital religion and AI, it develops four dimensions of wisdom-centered RE: epistemic judgment, practical-moral discernment, relational responsibility, and tradition-situated orientation toward ultimate goods. It concludes with implications for curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, teacher formation, and interfaith and public RE. Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/149461 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/149455 Title: Wounded hope : narrative identity, vulnerability, and forgiveness in religious education Abstract: Contemporary religious education encounters young people whose identities are formed amid vulnerability, social fragmentation, moral plurality, and digitally mediated narratives of self and world. This conceptual article develops wounded hope as a distinctive hermeneutical and pedagogical construct for religious education (RE). Wounded hope names an orientation that holds truthful memory of irreversible harm together with an ethically open future in which neither identity nor agency is exhausted by the wound. Paul Ricoeur supplies the principal hermeneutical architecture through narrative identity, mimesis, memory, recognition, and refiguration. Gabriel Marcel, Jürgen Moltmann, Paulo Freire, and Thomas Groome deepen and correct that architecture through philosophical hope, eschatological contradiction, critical praxis, and shared Christian praxis. Recent scholarship on Ricoeur, vulnerability, trauma-responsive education, youth flourishing, church-school climate, and digital religion is brought into dialogue with these foundational sources. The article argues that wounded hope is not optimism, resilience, post-traumatic growth, or a theology of redemptive suffering. It further contends that forgiveness in RE must remain a religious and ethical possibility rather than a compulsory educational outcome, and must be distinguished from forgetting, excusing, reconciliation, restored trust, and the suspension of justice. Developed from within a Catholic-Christian horizon while remaining dialogically open to wider RE, the article proposes a Narrative Pedagogy of Wounded Hope structured by five commitments: narrative hospitality, hermeneutical dialogue, critical discernment, hopeful refiguration, and ethical agency. Reflexively, the proposal also examines its own risks: theological overreach, therapeutic colonisation of education, the privileging of coherence, and the temptation to make hope itself coercive. Wounded hope is therefore offered not as a technique for repairing learners but as a disciplined educational disposition for inhabiting unfinished stories truthfully, critically, and hopefully. [excerpt] Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/149455 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/149418 Title: Thinking faithfully together : catholic religious education, ethics, and the philosophy for children pedagogy Authors: Wright, Edward Abstract: This conceptual article examines how Catholic Religious Education (CRE) and Ethics in Maltese schools might enter a constructive pedagogical dialogue while retaining distinct disciplinary identities. Rather than proposing curricular merger, hierarchy, or a common epistemology, it advances the more limited claim that a critically appropriated Philosophy for Children (P4C) pedagogy and its Community of Inquiry (CoI) can function as a shared pedagogical grammar. The Maltese case is analytically useful because Ethics is institutionally associated with P4C while recent CRE studies call for more student-centred, constructivist, and existentially responsive approaches. The article treats this proximity as a problem of disciplined borrowing: which dialogical practices can travel across subject boundaries, under what conditions, and what must remain discipline-specific? Drawing on Lipman and sustained critical engagement with Dewey, Freire, Arendt, and Merton, it identifies complementary but non-identical resources for experience-based inquiry, dialogical agency, judgement in plurality, and contemplative attention. Their tensions are retained rather than harmonised. Recent empirical and theoretical literature is used to qualify the scope of the proposal. The resulting framework develops implications for classroom practice, assessment, collaborative professional development, and future empirical research. Its contribution is therefore a bounded model of pedagogical dialogue: CRE may become more dialogical without treating theological sources as interchangeable with philosophical warrants, while Ethics may engage religiously situated moral worlds without compromising philosophical autonomy. Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/149418 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/149389 Title: Facilitating holistic identity formation of adolescents using digital media Authors: Wright, Edward Abstract: In recent decades, Catholic Religious Education (CRE) has been increasingly justified by the support it can provide adolescents to become subjects of life, as well as by its potential to provide opportunities for meaning‑making. Therefore, this chapter will explore how these functions of CRE can become more possible through the creative pedagogy of Media Literacy Education (MLE) and the digital technologies it utilises for storytelling, especially photography and videography. This exercise will also facilitate the exploration of ways through which creative story-telling can effectively become a means for transcendental reflection, thus promoting a narrative pedagogy for CRE that contributes significantly to holistic adolescent identity formation. This chapter will finally reflect on the results of a small scale qualitative pilot study that points to a potential dialogue between CRE and MLE. This chapter demonstrated how skills learnt in MLE, especially photography and film‑making, may be efficiently used to help students during CRE lessons interpret life experiences and discern their purposes in life through the lens of their Catholic faith, thus becoming subjects of their lives. Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/149389 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z