Temporal Mind Mapping

From time to time, I look back into the archives of this journal to see what folks were writing about ten or twenty or fifty years ago. It helps me to keep some perspective on the present. For instance, I often discover that the things that seem to be urgent new issues for today are instead new points of view from this different time-context on matters that have been important to religious education scholars and practitioners across many decades. Such discoveries do not make the present-day issues any less significant. Nor are the arguments made by contemporary authors any less original or interesting by virtue of being further developments of an earlier line of thinking rather than completely novel ideas. Instead, I find that it deepens my understanding to be able to see the contours of a discussion as it takes place across the years, as I engage in a type of temporal “mind-mapping”—drawing connections between a network of connected yet diverse ideas that have flourished over time. Here is an example. Way back in 1909, George E. Dawson raised the question in this journal regarding what religious education might gain from engaging “the biological sciences” (Dawson 1909, 438). Suggesting that in religious educational work with adolescents, “biological material drawn from neurology and psychology could be introduced,” Dawson went on to say that “the more practical facts bearing upon the nature of the brain and nervous system; their relation to the feelings, intellect and will ... might be presented either in occasional [sic] separate lessons, or in connection with material drawn from the Bible” (Dawson 1909, 440). Fast forward to 1993, when Jerry Larsen’s article (Larsen 1993), “Religious Education and the Brain: On Letting Cognitive Science Inform Religious Education,” charted the functions of various brain regions, asking, “Might knowledge of the brain inform us in religious education? Could it tell us something about the religious educator’s agenda and methods? Wouldn’t we be wise to let cognitive science inform us?” Nearly a decade after Larson’s queries, the REA’s annual meeting, under the leadership of then President-Elect Dean Blevins, explored the theme, “Brain Matters: Neuroscience, Creativity and Diversity.” The 2012 issue of the journal in which selected conference papers and addresses appear from that meeting (107:4) includes a fascinating array of research in our field in which forays into neuroscience opened new perspectives for religious education. One of the presenters in the 2012 meeting, Mary Hess, in her published conference paper (Hess 2012) provided an example of what Dawson asked for in 1909, albeit one hundred and three volume-years later in the journal. Hess, drawing on the work of her own historical moment’s contemporary brain research, described recent developments in knowledge about mechanisms within the human brain that allow for the experience of empathy. Mirror neurons give an observer access to the experience of another person by mapping onto the observer’s motor neurons the pattern of action they observe in another, so that the observer’s brain virtually “experiences” what the other person is actually experiencing, even in the absence of doing it with them. Hess noted that neuroscientists like Daniel Stern suggest that these mirror neurons thus play a key role in the development of empathy, which is surely an important characteristic to cultivate in faith formation. Hess considered the implications of this piece of scientific knowledge about mirror neurons for religious formation through