Seeing with New Eyes: Teaching Scripture using the Critically Engaging Creative Arts (CECA) Approach

The CECA Approach to teaching religion, unlike other approaches, is not specifically related to content but rather to the way students are invited to take part in the process of learning through critical engagement with the arts. The proposed CECA Approach comprises three movements, an Inquiry movement, an Investigation movement, and an Appraisal and Demonstration movement. It begins with naming and examining artistic and filmic retellings of biblical stories using a critical literacy approach and then applies a similar process to the biblical text. This paper will provide a theoretical framework for the approach and then engage participants in the practical application of the approach using a selection of artistic retellings and biblical texts. Introduction Religion and the arts have been vehicles through which societies have sought to express beliefs and to pass these beliefs on to others. Long before mass literacy, storytelling along with drawings, stained glass windows and statuary told the story of the Christian tradition. The creation of the printing press, led to availability of cheaper printed texts. The gradual acquiring of mass literacy began to shift the cultures of the time towards an ascendancy of the printed word. Christianity followed the trend and came to depend more and more on the printed word as the source for instruction. If academic instruction in religion concentrates only on written texts and ignores creative arts texts, the focus is too narrow. By expanding the discourse of religious education to include the creative arts, we are able to engage with and examine many ‘texts’. The approach suggested is not that of art, music or film history but one of ‘cultural studies’ which is inter-disciplinary, investigating texts through multiple lenses from the point of view of their cultural, political and social context as well as that of their