Jesus of Nazareth at the Heart of Catholic Schools: What Can We Learn about Jesus from the Gospel Women?

All Catholic schools locate Jesus of Nazareth at the heart of their enterprise. Jesus is their hero and sponsor; their inspiration and leader. Jesus of Nazareth is the key to the identity and mission of a Catholic school. Insights about Jesus provide intellectual, religious and pastoral resources that assist Catholic schools in pursuing their educational goals. Unfortunately, the sources for encountering and understanding Jesus seem opaque and distant rather than immediate and transparent. This paper focuses on the gospel women and what we might learn from them about Jesus of Nazareth. The paper surveys scholarship on the gospel women in order to gain insights into the meaning of Catholic identity in the context of contemporary Catholic schools

Holocaust education and religious education in Australian Catholic schools

The Nazi Holocaust is the back-drop to every conversation between Christians and Jews. Religious educators working in Christian contexts must be aware of this reality. This article examines educational responses for educating Christian students about the Nazi Holocaust. The Catholic Church has made a number of faltering steps towards responding to the holocaust. A brief overview of these attempts provides a context for this discussion

Religious education in Australian Catholic schools: Three historical snapshots

This paper consider three pivotal moments in the history of religious education in Australian Catholic schools. I want to claim that each of these moments introduced some new or modified themes to the theory and practice of religious education for Catholic practitioners. I content that the forms for religious education discovered in these pivotal moments persist in the memory of religious educators who work in Catholic schools. Sometimes, these memories become submerged, not to see the light of day until a much later time. In most cases though, the reforms maintained and iron grip on the imagination of successive generations of religious educators. A retelling of these moments and an evaluation of their meaning can assist contemporary religious educators to understand their heritage and to respond in their contemporary context

The presence and place of students who are not Catholic in Catholic schools: An analysis of official church documents

In many Australian Catholic schools, students who are not Catholics are increasingly seeking enrolment. While such students have always been present in Catholic schools their numbers have increased in recent years (Welboume, 2001). In NSW Catholic schools, for instance, the number of these students has doubled in percentage terms in the past 15 years to around five percent of the total student population, while the total increase in students has been marginal (NSWCEC, 2003). The growing presence of students who are not Catholics in Catholic schools raises "questions about the changing nature and purpose of the Catholic school as a context for religious education" (Welboume, 2003, p. 1). These questions focus on the nature and purpose of the classroom religion program and the evangelical and catechetical possibilities that form part of the Catholic school's pastoral mission. This article presents the results of an analysis of extracts from official Catholic church documents on education and catechesis concerning the enrolment in Catholic schools of students who are not Catholics. Membership Categorisation Analysis is the tool of analysis used to review these documents. The discussion of results and findings provides directions for further research as well as questions for reflection for school administrators and religious educators. The Church documents selected for study here are those deemed influential on the theory and practice of Catholic schools. Free body (2003, p. 179) argues that understanding how texts operate is critical for educators because: contemporary educational practice is saturated by texts; public educational arrangements are defined and regulated by texts; and, public educational activities are challenged, changed and legitimated by texts. Freebody's second point, "public educational arrangements are defined and regulated by texts", is central to this study. For religious educators and leaders in Catholic schools, the official church documents on education and catechesis define and regulate practices in Catholic schools. This article poses two main questions for these official documents. First, how do church officials regard the presence in Catholic schools of students who are not Catholics? This question seeks to judge the extent to which these students are welcome in Catholic schools. Second, what is the place of these students in Catholic schools? This question examines what is expected of these students when they attend a Catholic school

Global existence of reaction-diffusion equations over multiple domains

Systems of semilinear parabolic differential equations arise in the modelling of many chemical and biological systems. We consider m component systems of the form ut = DΔu + f (t, x, u) ∂uk/∂η =0 k =1, ...m where u(t, x)=(uk(t, x))mk=1 is an unknown vector valued function and each u0k is zero outside Ωσ(k), D = diag(dk)is an m à m positive definite diagonal matrix, f : R à Rnà Rm → Rm, u0 is a componentwise nonnegative function, and each Ωi is a bounded domain in Rn where ∂Ωi is a C2+αmanifold such that Ωi lies locally on one side of ∂Ωi and has unit outward normal η. Most physical processes give rise to systems for which f =(fk) is locally Lipschitz in u uniformly for (x, t) ∈ Ω Ã [0,T ] and f (·, ·, ·) ∈ L∞(Ω Ã [0,T ) à U ) for bounded U and the initial data u0 is continuous and nonnegative on Ω. The primary results of this dissertation are three-fold. The work began with a proof of the well posedness for the system . Then we obtained a global existence result if f is polynomially bounded, quaipositive and satisfies a linearly intermediate sums condition. Finally, we show that systems of reaction-diffusion equations with large diffusion coeffcients exist globally with relatively weak assumptions on the vector field f