• Journal of Christian Education in Korea
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• v.66
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• pp.413-437
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• 2021

Humans are created as spiritual beings that can relate to God. However, when a human spirit refuses to transform through confronting God, it experiences a crisis. A spiritual crisis results from disconnecting with God, who is the ultimate foundation, but we humans try to overcome such absence through accomplishments and efforts. In this technological age, the ethics issues of AI (Artificial Intelligence), robots, and cloning are related to anthropology. The development of the mind, heart, and logic cannot suggest a basis for destruction and confusion as much as the development of the world. In fact, education focused on the human mind cannot be considered holistic. Mind, together with thought, will, and belief, plays a crucial role in making choices and leading a human life. So it is actively studied in other domains other than Christian education. However, although the human spirit takes care of some territory of humanity, unlike the mind, it can neither be partial nor fragmentary. Instead, it manages the transformation that influences the core of human life. Therefore, Christian education must clearly concentrate on the spirit rather than on other human elements, intentionally concerning spiritual transformation through encounters with God. In other words, Christian education is the passage connecting a human spirit to God's presence at work, which enables us to understand the human being as a whole. For this, we must put our efforts to increase the chances of encountering God through Christian education. While "Encounter" requires both parties' interaction, "Transformation" stresses God as the main agent and His proactive nature. I also want to emphasize "worship" as the opportunity to communicate and experience God in our daily lives. By examining the preparation and the process of the spiritual transformation of humans, this paper would offer a theological foundation for continued transformation of the human spirit in the faith community, rather than personal experience or conviction.

• Journal of Christian Education in Korea
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• v.66
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• pp.113-145
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• 2021

As a contemporary exponent of Bauderillard's Simulation and Simulacra, this paper aims to reflect on the 'consumer culture' criticized by Baudrillard from the lens of Christian Education in reading the Drama, Penthouse related to the notions of the consumption-ideology, the desire and violence of image in the post-Covid 19 era. As Baudrillard begins to realize that the concept of simulation rooted from mass media in the modern society, he explains mass media as the emerging of Simulation or the process of Simulation will lead to the impulsion of reality, which ends up with vanishing the original reality. Baudrillard is explaining in his argument that the process of Simulation proceeds among various areas of the contemporary society being manipulated by mass media. While Simulation is the process of producing the hyperreality characterized by the excess of images that seems more real than the original reality, Simulation brought about Simulacra as excess reality or consequently exploding reality. Christian educators in the post-Covid 19 must know how to deal with critical theory by considering positive ways of avoiding questioning of how to articulate what the norm of universal consensus is in the specific situation. In other words, it should be noted that the nature of the ruling ideology and the ideology of consumption has been influenced or manipulated by mass media. Christian educators especially have to help young people in seeing the messages from the images of the screens, television, soap-opera, and commercial advertising making reality as Simulacre which is more real than the original reality. When the medium becomes the message, the power of medium makes the consumer not reach communication with it. This is the main reason in the controversy about the images on television drama, Penthouse and the impact of images on people's mind. As an exponent of McLuhan's belief that "the medium is the message", Baudrillard argues although the message and a subject of Simulacra(excessive reality) is unexpectedly disappearing, the medium itself is vanished through the silence of image. However, the task of Christian education has to fuel how we teach, learn, share and pass on the Word of God as the Message. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the Message of God cannot be vanished or burst with the impulsion of it, but exists forever. With Baudrillard's ideas of Simulation and Simulacra in mind, the work of Christian education as an observation platform can better engage the reflection on a consumer society of consumerism that makes Church community and a consumer irresistible against the Fake world.