Theology to the masses!

Yesterday, in the conference hall of the Danilovsky hotel complex, a meeting “Theology in Universities: Interaction of Church, State and Society” began under the chairmanship of Patriarch Kirill. The Church sets itself the task of expanding the experience of teaching theology in public educational institutions. Things really, apparently, are not going very well. Departments (and in some places, faculties) of theology began to appear in state universities in 1994 - the initiative was initiated by Omsk State University - in 2007 there were already 36 universities. Over the past five years, only one more has been added. And this is very understandable - what is the Russian economy’s need for theologians?

For example, at the Far Eastern State University (FESU) in the department of religious studies and theology this year there were 11 and 11 budget places (for both specialties, on a nationwide scale 189 budget places were allocated for theologians). According to the testimony of Archpriest Rostislav Moroz, assistant professor of the department, it was possible to recruit people for these places (even some, as he admitted, “were left behind”), but there is no talk of a full-fledged competition yet. But in the “ineffective” Russian State University for the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy this year there were 14 budget places - a comparable number - with a total number of applications of 308 (that is, 22 people per place). So is it worth speeding up the creation of new departments and departments of theology?

According to Patriarch Kirill, the emergence of departments of theology in secular universities will help prepare qualified specialists, including for teaching the Fundamentals of Religious Cultures and Secular Ethics (ORKSE) in schools. But where is the guarantee that people will go to school? As a rule, those who want to become a teacher go for more commonly used specialties. At the same FENU, students who graduate from the department go to work in municipal authorities as some kind of religious advisers, in diocesan structures, in parishes as social workers. “It is still quite difficult to talk about serious scientific activity,” admits Rostislav Moroz. It turns out that the state, with its own money, is largely training personnel for the church, while the educational sector is simply groaning from underfunding. The reports announced at the meeting - “The Department of Theology as a center for catechetical, missionary and social work, work with youth and the media (Metropolitan Pavel of Ryazan), “The Department of Theology as a support for the activities of the Metropolis” (Metropolitan Benjamin of Vladivostok) - only confirm this.

Former Minister of Education and now presidential aide Andrei Fursenko, who together with the church went through the difficult path of introducing the ORKSE course into secondary schools, spoke in his speech about the need to train in-demand specialists. “If there is even an ounce of artificiality in the undertaking, we can compromise the whole thing,” he said. The state, to please the Patriarchate, has already spent enormous amounts of money on introducing the fundamentals of Orthodoxy into schools, but it ended up being that at best, a third of schoolchildren chose these very fundamentals of Orthodoxy. However, the new subject took away invaluable hours from literature, Russian, and history.

When the department of theology appears at the Far Eastern University and students go to study specifically at it, no questions arise - everyone chooses what they like. But what is the department of theology at the Ural Mining University or at MEPhI, for example? It’s unlikely that anyone will go to MEPhI to study theology. This means that the department will either turn into a beautiful sign, or students will be forced to “become spiritually enriched.” Well, what kind of dialogue between science and theology can there be after this - another, as many speakers assured, task of the “theological offensive”?

NEW: was adopted at the meeting the final document .