Prospects for the development of spiritual education in Ukraine

Abstract

The article is devoted to a critical study of the vision of Ukrainian theologians of the possible prospects for the development of spiritual education in Ukraine in connection with the general changes expected by various theologians in the position of religion in the national public space, identifying what is really connected with the potential for further positive changes in Ukrainian theology and spiritual education. Ukrainian theologians and their supporters among researchers associate positive prospects for the development of spiritual education with new opportunities that the postmodern or post-postmodern worldview supposedly provides. The present is assessed as a post-secular state of sociality, as religion returns to the public sphere. In this regard, the author criticizes the dualism of the secular and the religious characteristic of modernity, the modern identification of the social with the secular, and the attribution of the religious exclusively to the private sphere of life. Ukrainian theologians and their supporters believe that the crisis of secularization theories and the return of religion to the public sphere themselves legitimize the existence of theology as a science and the recognition of spiritual education as part of the national educational space. Legal recognition of theology in 2014 opened up opportunities for the legitimization of theological ideas in general scientific discourse, but it turned out that even political theology and theology of education can only offer rather limited projects that develop the ideas of Western postmodern neo-Augustinianism. The situation is aggravated by the dominance in a significant number of seminaries and in a large number of specific branches of theology "theology of repetition", due to the inability to offer their own Christian democratic ideas, due to the refusal to create a social teaching that would meet the complex challenges of our time. The analysis shows that today those confessional systems of spiritual education in Ukraine, which are provided by leading research institutes, have sustainable development. These institutes create high-quality scientific products, set the general high level of teaching and learning, and train highly qualified personnel. Thus, it is the modern educational technology of the creation by a certain denomination (or their associations, as in the case of Protestants) of the main scientific and educational center, which acts in accordance with all national and world standards of education and science, that makes it possible to justify theology and create conditions for the development of all ordinary elements of confessional systems of spiritual education.