Learning to Give As Part of Religious Education

Learning to Give as Part of Religious Education attempts to answer the question: what is actually to go on in a lesson about "life" or "reality"? It takes as its starting point a sure ground of adolescent concern: the compassion for human suffering which is normally awakened and keenly felt in the middle teens. It then proceeds to inform this compassion: it explores the depth and shape of the need; it amasses the facts of the situation; it illustrates the human meaning of it, with quotation from biography and poetry and personal documents; it describes the efforts made, in active compassion, to relieve the need; and it makes suggestions of ways in which the young can share in the work of relief. Finally, it marches on to biblical and other statements about the human situation that set these specific agonizing points of suffering against the vast problem of evil, viewed in the light of a belief in a God who cares, thus lifting the human adventure from its sublunar situation on to a cosmic level.