Pluralism and Religious Education

How might we design religious education to reduce religious conflict? After briefly summarising the problem and types of educational solutions, I propose strategies for non-confessional initiatives, including: increasing empathy for the religious other, decreasing exclusivism, reframing religion functionally, and critically and creatively engaging radically diverse worldviews. Such proposals require testing and continual improvement, so I also offer an approach toward collaborative design and evaluation. The premise behind my proposal is that religion is best conceived as a technology – a set of cultural tools for aligning attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. Religious education is therefore a form of technology education.

This article examines whether or not the ubiquitous model of religious education (i.e. non-confessional multifaith religious education (RE)) in state schools in Great Britain is capable of fulfilling the aims of education articulated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). It maintains
that to the degree that this RE model aims to promote critical, rational, and cognitive understanding of religion, it seeks to facilitate the development of children’s mental abilities. It also contends that to the extent that RE curriculum contents mirror the theistic worldviews and non-theistic ideologies identified within its pluralistic social order, this curriculum subject aims to foster children’s development of respect for: human rights and fundamental freedoms; individual identity, affiliation, cultural diversity and pluralism; mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence; and, the natural environment. In these respects, RE in state schools in Great Britain aspires to fulfil the educational aims enunciated in the UNCRC.

This article traces the historical background to the polarised religious education (RE) curricula in Nigerian primary and secondary schools, highlighting some post-colonial interventions and backlashes. Using regional treaties and international human rights frameworks, this article considers the probable justifications for deploying the confessional model of RE, accentuating the possible violations of the principles of religious freedom necessitated by the deployment of the confessional pedagogical model in Nigeria’s publicly funded schools. In consonance with contemporary trends in RE in Europe, Australia, Canada and South Africa, to mention a few, this article advocates the substitution of the currently deployed confessional, monoreligious education curricula with a non-confessional, multifaith RE curriculum. In emphasizing the potential benefits of non-confessional, multifaith RE, this article highlights how this model of RE respects, protects and fulfills the rights of the child which are unequivocally articulated in regional treaties and international human rights law. The article finally draws attention to strategies requisite for implementing non-confessional, multifaith RE in Nigeria’s publicly funded primary and secondary schools.

All the religious traditions raise endless prayers for living aids, those spread all over human lives. Without the hope that in all our needs and trials we have 'someone' to second us, so powerful that can help us overcome anything that stands in our path (more accurate 'against our wish'), most religious traditions would not be given any consideration, for humans become religious mostly when falling into a trial of life. By this hope religiousness flourishes and religious offer develops. Still, there is another way of considering prayer, one of spiritual becoming, diverse, and at the same time equally tender. It doesn't offer goods, or aids, or anything specific, instead, it is professed by many spiritual persons that stood in the divine's company. Theologians call it apophasis, spiritualists call it contemplation. Non-believers assert that the 'responses' of prayers followed by the 'altering' of reality is merely a mental projection, a Placebo effect of believing in prayer's effect, or even just a mere coincidence. Either way, we need to learn prayer's genuine significance and what it really provides. As for the subtitle, it is an allusion to the ancient game of Go whose main skill is to 'know' in advance tens, hundreds, or even infinite moving variables with their follow-ups, so you can be prepared and have a prepared answer every time to any move the teammate would make.

When Religious Education (RE) in England and Wales transitioned from Christian confessionalism to a multi-faith approach in the latter half of the twentieth century, the subject’s moral aims were reasserted. In this article, we explore the moral assumptions of this transformation and map some of their connections to other theological and ethical ideas. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of a rhizome, we make two novel contributions to scholarship in this regard. First, through some salient examples we show the connections between the moral aims of multi-faith RE and the assumptions of Kantian moral religion. The second contribution, building on this analysis, identifies three moral justifications of multi-faith RE: universalist (founded on assumptions of moral universals across religions), vicarious (the support of a religious worldview by using other religions’ moral teachings) and instrumentalist (a moral justification based on the supposed extrinsic benefits of studying religions). We then go onto consider how these assumptions may differ from the moral commitments of the religions they appropriate, suggesting they disrupt and recombine theocentric concepts into pedagogic ones.

Reset Dialogues in partnership with the King Abdul-Aziz Al Saoud Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences and the Granada Institute for Higher Education and Research, are pleased to present this international symposium that was made possible also thanks to the support of Henry Luce Foundation’s Initiative on Religion in International Affairs, Nomis Foundation and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

As a global religion, Islam and its jurisprudence have offered heterogeneous responses to a range of questions facing different faiths and communities. Modernity imposed new questions upon religious scholars, theologians and philosophers, demanding of them a new version of pluralism in the theological and political arenas. While doctrinal or philosophical exclusivism rejects “the other” in theory — and frequently in practice, too — inclusivism connotes the accommodation and toleration of difference. But if that means the reluctant acceptance of difference within a hierarchy of worldviews, inclusion may not be enough to create more egalitarianism within modern multicultural societies. Modern pluralism might come to mean, instead, a robust appreciation of human diversity and values.

This article maintains that the teaching of religion in state-funded schools in liberal democracies, especially in Western Europe, is premised on the need for the child to acquire critical, rational, and cognitive understanding of religion rather than seeking to nurture her or him in a specific faith tradition. Drawing on one hypothetical religious education classroom scenario, this article contends that the deployment of epistemic egalitarianism and epistemic neutrality in the relativistic, pluralistic, and equitable presentation of competing claims arguably facilitates critical thinking, rational autonomy, and the child's right to an open future. It, therefore, exemplifies how the teaching of religion in state-funded schools in liberal democracies could engender the actualization of the liberal aims of education articulated in educational theory and philosophy.

This work seeks to do two things. First to make an argument for a robust engagement with theology as a theoretical framework for critical educational research. And second, the piece draws upon contemporary queer and progressive Christian theology, in particular, theological interventions from Marcela Althaus Reid's Indecent Theology to think differently about how educational researchers might frame the way we say yes, as Jen Gilbert suggests, to the students who show up in the classroom. This intervention seeks to center theology as a way to think differently with LGBTQ issues in schooling by arguing with an epistemology that is often used to exclude rather than include marginalized populations. Indecent Theology is a theology which problematizes and undresses the mythical layers of multiple oppressions … a theology which, finding its point of departure at the crossroads of Liberation Theology and Queer Thinking, will reflect on economic and theological oppression with passion and imprudence (Althaus-Reid 2000, p. 2). Theology in educational research It is vital to note here, that there are, of course, a great many theologies that pervade both historically and of necessity, then, contemporaneously. My use of theology in the singular is to suggest that the field itself, though vastly heterogenous is one perpetually underconsidered in educational scholarship. Though we exist in something of a magpie's nest of pastiched traditions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, law, feminisms, and increasingly, to ill effect often, economics, recent educational scholarship has tended to skirt around work with the theological-with happy exceptions (see: Pinar, 2019; Rocha & Burton 2017; Rocha & Sañudo, forthcoming)-for a number of reasons. This has much to do, one suspects, with the suspicious light in which religion is held, to the degree that it's considered at all in the field of educational research broadly: as a legal matter tied in with discourses around identity positions. There's much to say about the active position religion takes in continually shaping the educational (and research) experience, (see: Author, years) but in this case, while acknowledging the significant shading in the Venn diagram here, the paper works to disentangle, just a bit, the theos from religion. In this case, it's useful to think with Calasso who notes that theos "has

Nowadays, the term“interreligiosity” is well-established in discussions about religious education. This paper addresses various current approaches and concepts within interreligious pedagogy in Germany and Austria. On the one hand, it strives to bring order to the wide, impervious variety of previous approaches and on the other hand itidentifies existing focal points, main topics and tendencies. The research subjects are theoretic-conceptual models, didactic and methodological approaches, and empirical analyses on applied interreligious projects within pedagogical practice. It is shown that there is an imbalance in the existing literature - namely, the lack of practical orientation. The paper concludes by outlining suggestions on the future of interreligious pedagogical research.

After presenting the programme Ethics and religious culture, Stéphanie Gravel will present the first results of her research entitled Impartiality and the Ethics and Religious Culture Program (Quebec 2008). The overall objective of this presentation is to address a central dimension of the role of educators in the context of school neutrality, the impartiality as defined in the nondenominational Ethics and Religious Culture program and the subsequent practices undertaken by secondary school teachers in Quebec. After presenting the requirements of impartiality stipulated in the Ethics and Religious Culture curriculum and her research methodology, Gravel will summarize her research results about the characteristics, factors, and criteria emanating from the implementation of impartiality in secondary schools. This data stems from classroom observations and semi-structured interviews conducted with 8 to 10 cases of “typical” or “exemplary” Ethics and Religious Culture secondary school teachers from private and public schools in Montreal and beyond the Greater Montreal Area.

This article maintains that the teaching of religion in state funded schools in liberal democracies, especially in Western Europe, is premised on the need for the child to acquire critical, rational and cognitive understanding of religion rather than seeking to nurture her or him in a specific faith tradition. Drawing on one hypothetical religious education classroom scenario, this paper contends that the deployment of epistemic egalitarianism and epistemic neutrality in the relativistic, pluralistic and equitable presentation of competing claims arguably facilitates critical thinking, rational autonomy and the child's right to an open future. It, therefore, exemplifies how the teaching of religion in state funded schools in liberal democracies could engender the actualisation of the liberal aims of education articulated in educational theory and philosophy.