ABSTRACT
In what follows I present a reflective response to many of the issues that Dermot Lane raises in Chapter 9 . His stock-taking of Vatican II’s legacy and his pursuit of a twenty-first century anthropology, all in the service of Catholic education and theology , is meaty, visionary and a model of compressed lucidity. Responding, I have opted to reflect – more fully than he left space for himself to do – on its significance for the philosophy and the practice of Catholic education. First, I will ‘imagine’ a series of direct translations to Catholic schools of his observations on the Vatican II legacy and the travails of the contemporary self . Second, I will comment briefly on his anthropological ‘building blocks’, before digressing to reflect on the nature of an academic domain of Catholic educational theory suited to accommodating such ‘blocks’ and facilitating ‘translations’ like the earlier ones. It could be called a Catholic philosophy of education . Third, I will present, briefly, three illustrative lines of reflection and argument that resonate with Lane’s anthropological reflections and have good claims to be among the fundamentals of this philosophy.
