International research shows that the curricula of Catholic secondary schools are increasingly becoming dominated by the pressures of conforming to the requirements of nation states. These requirements are generally expressed in economic and utilitarian terms and evaluated by criteria of measurable outputs. As a result of these pressures, Catholic…

Charles Darwin supposed that evolution involved a process of gradual change, generated randomly, with the selection and retention over many generations of survival-promoting features. Some theists have never accepted this idea. "Intelligent design" is a relatively recent theory, supposedly based on scientific evidence, which attempts to…

During the 1979 Victorian state election, fundamentalist Christian groups such as the Citizens Against Social Evil launched a public campaign against the inclusion of homosexual content in secondary school education. And, on March 19, 1979, the Minister of Education's office sent out an order to all secondary school principals directing them…

This contribution reports research into young people's attitudes to religion and religious diversity in secondary schools across the UK. The data indicate that students' respect for the religiosity of their peers, or their lack of it, is due less to the influence of classroom RE (multi-faith or otherwise) than to the experience of religion in the…

This article presents the author's reply to the comments of Bragg, Allington, Simmons and Jones to his article "Transaction and transformation at Trinity" (Pike, 2010) wherein he reported a case study of Trinity Academy, which serves a former mining community and social priority area near Doncaster in South Yorkshire. In 2008, just…

A curious piece of ironic, partially-dramatised auto/ethnography, this paper reflects an ongoing attempt to explore the vapid certainties of my own faith, some of the brittle discomforts of contemporary schooling, and the possibilities of a social science research methodology which can artfully assemble on the same stage belief, empirics and…

This essay represents an attempt to contribute to the growing body of literature on education in conflict and emergency situations by analyzing shifts in sources of authority and their influence on conceptions of leadership in the context of a decades-long armed conflict in the predominately Muslim regions of the southern Philippines. Interviews…