Curriculum as liturgy Reorienting Christian education towards the formation of desire in the algorithmic age

Abstract

This article offers a conceptual reconstruction of the Christian education curriculum as a liturgical practice of desire formation amid contemporary algorithmic counter-liturgies. Beginning from the diagnosis that learners of Christian Religious Education in Indonesia are intensively formed by algorithm-driven digital ecosystems before they ever enter the classroom or the church, while most Christian education curricula continue to operate within a cognitivist paradigm that treats human beings as mere thinking things, the study argues that the curriculum must be reconceptualized, theologically and pedagogically, as a counter-liturgy that forms the ordo amoris. Employing a qualitative-constructive approach grounded in library research, the article synthesizes James K. A. Smith’s liturgical anthropology with the techno-cultural diagnostics of Byung-Chul Han, Shoshana Zuboff, and Nicholas Carr, and then formulates four reconstructive principles: embodiment, repetition, narration, and community. Building upon, while also distinguishing itself from, the existing Indonesian reception of Smith, the article’s contribution lies in its academic triangulation of liturgical anthropology with techno-cultural critique and in the translation of that triangulation into the regulatory architecture of Indonesian Christian Religious Education, examined through the documented liturgical traditions of the HKBP and the GKI.