[DOWNLOAD] "Christianity and the Cultivation of Global Citizens (Essay)" by Modern Age * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Christianity and the Cultivation of Global Citizens (Essay)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 194 KB
Description
When Barack Obama gave his speech "A World That Stands as One" in Berlin, the most receptive audience to his claim of being a "citizen of the world" who believed that "the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together" may have been the American academy, which has come to be dominated by cosmopolitan concerns. The college where I teach, Hope College, has as part of its mission statement that it will prepare students "for lives of leadership and service in a global society." Nor is my college unique in this regard. Campus Compact, an organization dedicated to turning institutions or higher learning into citizenship prep schools, boasts over 1,100 member colleges and universities. The Association of American Colleges and Universities works with its 1,200 member schools to develop a "meaningful and relevant curriculum" whose "essential learning outcomes" will prepare students for global citizenship. Indeed, perusing the mission or vision statements of the 200 colleges and universities listed at the top of the U.S. News and World Report rankings indicates that more schools understand themselves as cosmopolitan universities, not dedicated to serving their local communities or even the nation, but to serving the world; and they seek to educate students not by teaching them to think the unity of truth, but by "providing" them with "knowledge and skills" to be leaders in "a global society." With the advent of media coverage of large sectors of the globe over a twenty-four-hour news cycle, an increasingly interdependent global economy, and a renewed emphasis on multilateralism in the wake of the end of the Cold War. the social conditions became favorable to a renewal of cosmopolitanism. While Stoicism provides a model for these educational theories, these theories likewise require the reality of empire as the sine qua non for their project. Proponents advance formal education as a program of moral action and moral development, one that casts our moral possibilities as broadly as possible. St. Thomas's reflections on charity, however, provide a superior way of thinking about the nature of moral obligation and its relation to education, and they also show that the cosmopolitan vision is not exacting enough, for in attempting to love all, it actually loves less.