Religious education is queer. At first, it may seem as if "queer" and "religious education" barely belong in the same sentence; however, a fresh look at the definition of queer within the current understanding of religious education reveals a deep connection. Playing on the historical question of Harrison Elliott, "Can…

Global ecological crisis calls for humanity's "ecological conversion," as well as deconversion from consumerism as a faith system. Conversion involves the imagination, which suggests an important role for visual images in religious education for ecological conversion. Yet educational proposals for deconversion from consumer culture have…

Death always brings questions for the living. How do we teach and learn in a context of death and pandemic? This essay recounts and reflects on experiences of "playing in the face of death" in a graduate-level adult learning community at the onset of COVID-19 in New York City. Play became a healing and holy act of pedagogical love and…

This article seeks to address the question: "How can religious educators learn from those who have been marginalized and whose voices are not usually heard because of the hegemony of whiteness?" My primary sources are scenes from the work of two U.S. black creatives. Specifically, I examine the "Clearing" scene in Toni…

This article offers a critique of consumer culture that draws on Augustine's vision of human consciousness, exploring consumerism's formative effects on the memory, attention, and imagination of consumers. Drawing on William Cavanaugh's analysis of consumers' disposition of detachment, it explains how consumer culture distorts memory, attention,…

When the Religious Education Association (REA) was founded in 1903 in Chicago, the purpose of the organization was to explore innovative ways of envisioning, or we could say imagining, religious and moral instruction. At its first convention William Rainey Harper articulated a guiding vision for religious education that included foci on both…

Inspired by the 2015 REA Atlanta conference theme, "The Power of Imagining: The Life Giving Possibilities of Education in Faith," this article proposes a postmodern reclamation of imagination as the human bridge to sacramentally encounter the Divine. It re-examines sacramental religious education retrieving imagination from material…

Christian religious educators are charged with teaching the practice of loving as Jesus did--transforming broken relationships and enacting radical, life-giving ways of being with and for one another. Redefining some of the sensibilities of "clown ministry" of earlier decades, the author presents clowning as a critical pedagogy that…

Approaching Christian education in light of Charles Sanders Peirce's Classical Pragmatism can help catechists make Christian tradition more intelligible to present-day North Americans; it can provide them with a rich framework for pedagogical practices; and it can help them offer a compelling vision of deeper participation in the Trinitarian life…

Those who are oppressed often find themselves internalizing voices that limit their ability. This article focuses on a population that falls on the non-hegemonic side of the intersection of race, class, gender, and age: Black girls from poor and working-class backgrounds. From my work with youth, I have noticed that internalizing these limiting…

This article describes six constitutive "senses" of the "Christian educator's imagination." These dispositions toward knowing, being, and doing characterize competent leadership in educational ministry. They include a sense for vocational empowerment, a sense for teaching and learning, a sense for seeking God's presence; a sense for the contours…