Abstract

This chapter seeks to discuss the advantages and pitfalls of critiquing societal and cultural liturgies within history education as a means to shaping a ‘Winter’ Christian ‘social imaginary’. Teachers gravitate, through either curricular directive or quality pedagogy, towards using cultural liturgies from society at large in implementing the curriculum in their classroom. Critical curricular and/or pedagogical practices that immerse students into wider societal stories, myths and values that unconsciously shape the society in which they live develop significant skills of analysis and critique. Carrying these skills into faith worlds may seem to create, in a polar model of faith, individuals of low faith/high complaint dispositions. The psychologist Beck :68–78, 2007, The Authenticity of Faith, 2012), provides a ‘circumplex model’ of faith in which he identifies a ‘Winter Christian’ as a faith practitioner with a high communion/high complaint distinctiveness, or, someone who is finely attuned to any disconnect between the teachings and practice of faith perspectives. Beck’s model provides a framework for a teacher to integrate skills of historical criticism whilst developing a coherent Christian ‘social imaginary’ in the classroom.