The primary goal of religious education (RE) in Germany is to enable students to develop a personal worldview. According to the literature, this goal can best be achieved when RE a) presents material from various worldviews and b) relates this material to the student's daily life. Denominational RE, which is the organisational format of this…

Pedagogue's fallacy occurs when epistemological principles are applied by educators that in fact do not tell of, or explain, or help understand, the subject at hand. It is identified and introduced in this article to raise an important issue in the construction of pedagogical models of religious education: knowledge is reduced and/or distorted to…

This article problematizes the practice of relying on participant self-identification in research on religious, secular, and spiritual identity (RSSI) within the field of higher education, with particular attention to the implications related to participants who chose non-religious labels. While this practice is commonplace in the field, it is…

This article presents analyses of curricula in religious education (RE) for public schools in Austria, Scotland, and Sweden. A curricula is the plan that outlines the goals, content and outcomes in education. A critical discourse analysis approach (CDA) is used to explore how each national RE curricula constructs (a) the aims, status and purpose…

Background: In the Netherlands, most of the academic curricula for teacher training in religious education (RE) focus on shortfalls of students, like a lack of knowledge about the plurality of worldviews and the diversity in interpretations of the Christian tradition. In our research project, the focus is not on the students, but on the university…

Ongoing global issues relating to the decline of the popularity of institutional religions, the rise of numbers of non-religious persons, and new models of spirituality in superdiverse societies have resulted in the need to reconceptualise religious diversity as worldviews diversity, and to critically examine increasing calls for the provision of…

This article gives voice to students of minority faith and worldview regarding their lived experiences of attending Irish post-primary schools with a Catholic ethos. The importance of listening to students' voice is supported by Article 12 of the United Nations Charter on the Rights of the Child (1992). The research methodology was qualitative,…

Catholic schools in the United States continue to struggle with declining enrollment just as the wider American Church continues to struggle with rampant disaffiliation. While some Catholic educators have generated creative solutions to keep their schools afloat, the long-term viability of U.S. Catholic education will require understanding the…

In this article the method of Scriptural Reasoning (SR), a text-based approach to interreligious dialogue between participants of the three Abrahamic religions, was implemented for a teacher education setting at a German university. Not only students with an outspoken religious conviction but also agnostic and atheist students, preparing…

In the project "Learning for Life" we developed a hermeneutical--communicative model for worldview education that answers the European challenges of worldview diversity and worldview illiteracy. We implemented the model in a participatory action research project at nine schools for primary education in the Netherlands and monitored the…

Religious educators today are called upon to enable young people to develop as fully-rounded human beings in a multicultural and multi-faith world. It is no longer sufficient to teach about the history of religions: religion is not relegated to the past. It is no longer sufficient to teach about the observable outward phenomena of religions:…

"The Wiley Handbook of Christianity and Education" provides a resource for students and scholars interested in the most important issues, trends, and developments in the relationship between Christianity and education. It offers a historical understanding of these two intertwined subjects with a view to creating a context for the myriad…

St. Augustine of Hippos' writing on education offers a fresh lens through which the conceptual framework of religious education in the Catholic school can be understood. Recent teaching of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church on the distinctive nature of religious education and catechesis has challenged religious educators to find an alternative…

This article argues that educators should be aware of the way that Christian beliefs interact with the structure and practices of secular education policies and that established secular social theory can help them to do this. Drawing on an example from empirical research, the author models how concepts associated with Bourdieu's social theory can…

In the early 1980s, it was not sub-prime mortgages and toxic assets, bank failures and factory closures that crowded the pages of the business section of the daily newspapers. It was something called "stagflation," a noxious combination of inflationary pressures on currency and stagnating levels of production. Still, the effects were…