120 Chapter 3 In time, more of his works have been rediscovered (a process lasting well into the twentieth century), and the discipline of Comeniology has continued to grow. Through these efforts has emerged a richer, more complex picture of Comenius’s thinking that recognizes the integral connections among the many facets of his thinking. (p. 11) D.I. Smith (2017) judged that Comenius’ insights could be meaningful in an era of pluralism, wherein Christian education is no longer the naturally expected thing. This meaning lies, above all, in the connection Smith (2017) made between the general and the specific, between pansophy and Christianity, between cognition, morality and spirituality: He combined a focus on universal education with a fundamental orientation to Christian faith and to Christ as the one in whom all things would be renewed. In a society more secular and pluralistic than envisaged by Comenius, the question arises regarding whether we must simply drop one or the other of these emphases, seeking either universal schooling without religion or religious schooling that is for the few and excludes the many (…) Comenius would have regarded the separation of religion from the curriculum as a fundamental mistake. (…) To pretend that we can know things about the world and gain skills for speaking and acting in it without becoming morally responsible for how we affect the world through our words and actions is inadequate. Knowledge and virtue are connected. (pp. 72–73) Jan Hábl on Comenius Jan Hábl is one of the most prominent interpreters of Comenius’ work today. Like Comenius, he is Czech and, therefore, has a double connection to his inspirer. Hábl’s (2011; 2017) work has focused on Comenius’ meaning for the world (including Western culture) and his meaning for the reality of Czechia, where scholars look to Comenius from the perspective of liberation from communism. The former meaning has to do with the latinised name Comenius under which the Moravian pedagogue tried to formulate answers to the ‘educational, cultural religious, and political needs of the entirety of the western world which had dramatically self-destructed in the cataclysm of the Thirty Years War’. The latter meaning has to do with his original name Komenský, which he used when offering answers to ‘a very particular historical tradition, the relatively unknown Czech Protestant Church, the Unitas Fratrum, in interaction with various currents of western thought’ (Hábl, 2011, p. 7). In broader Western culture, according to Hábl (2011), the question of what man really is should be recognised as central. The French philosopher Chantal
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