James Michael Lee (in Forging a better religious education in the third millennium, Religious Education Press, Birmingham, AL, 2000, p. 3) suggests that "religious education visions a broad sweeping future and then makes that future happen earlier than it would have happened if religious education were not there." Religious Education…

This article describes the contours of hermeneutical learning in the context of religious education. Hermeneutical learning is firstly distinguished from monoreligious learning and multireligious learning. Hermeneutical learning is based on a triple hermeneutic task: interpretation of text, context and the biography of the student, and avoids both…

According to Church statistics, 6.9 million children were enrolled in Catholic primary and secondary schools in Europe. Enrolment has remained relatively stable over the last 40 years in comparison to other regions of the world, contributing to education pluralism. This may be in part because in many countries, Catholic and private schools benefit…

As "justice natives," today's undergraduate students are motivated to engage directly with the world around them in ways unseen throughout most previous generations. Interestingly, secular humanistic perspectives on changemaking are in keeping with a wide variety of biblical teachings and principles of Christian social thought. At the…

Under Communism, the Catholic Church in Poland played the role of guarantor of preserving the national traditions and defender of freedom. Such was one of reasons for removing religion from the state school curriculum by the government of Poland in 1961. The political transformation of 1989 changed the concept of the Polish state. Religion as a…

Jesus' stories and parables--the products of his own imagination--are at the core of Christian religious education. Christian religious educators are to encourage their audience to engage their imagination to let Jesus' stories retain their power to form and transform them. Although imagination operates imperceptibly, it is essential to faith…

As an effective tool used within the evocative method of phenomenological inquiry, this article details the use of the written anecdotes of Godly Play storytellers in Australia to understand children as a means of grace. The phenomenological framework out of which the evocative method emanates is described, and four examples from the author's…

Religious education in England is experiencing change of 'spring tide' proportions during the third decade of the twenty-first century. This paper offers a flavour of aspects of education theory informing the development of a locally agreed syllabus in the English context. After offering some background contextual information, the paper proceeds…

Philosophers of education often view the role of religion in education with suspicion, claiming it to be impossible, indoctrinatory or controversial unless reduced to secular premises and aims. The 'post-secular' and 'decolonial' turns of the new millennium have, however, afforded opportunities to revaluate this predilection. In a social and…

The Catholic Church has recently issued a call for "educating to fraternal humanism" that envisions a pluralist society in which all voices are to be heard. This contrasts with previously held positions of outright rejection of pluralist society (Augustinian Thomism) or Christianisation (Whig Thomism). This paper advances a Dominican…

In this paper, the author focuses on one aspect of Catholic Intellectual Tradition, namely, how it manifests in practice. Focusing on five such practices--responsiveness to other traditions within Catholicism, recognition of wisdom and truth that may be found in other cultures, the search for understanding of relationships within reality,…

Religious education has long been part of Zambia's primary and secondary education curriculum. It will be argued that, though its role has changed, it has never been highly educational. This is seen to be a major challenge today in the light of a swiftly expanding urban population who find themselves ever more rootless. To address it, it is…

While the resources for biblical interpretation are multiplying, there are no current models for reading biblical texts in community with culturally hybrid persons. Contextual Bible Study (CBS) presents a pedagogical framework to help fill the gap. This article offers an overview of CBS as well as a case study that looks at a reading community (a…

US Catholic schools have been known to educate the whole child. However, the Catholic sector has not widely embraced a shared understanding of whole child education or how it is operationalised, nor have researchers interested in this sector effectively measured the impact of approaches in any or all domains. This conceptual paper presents a…

A lively conversation has arisen in recent years among theologians concerning ethnographic theology. While liberation theologians have scarcely participated in it, an emphasis on lived experience -- which ethnography aims to understand -- lies at the heart of theologies of liberation. This article addresses the question of employing ethnographic…