Reluctance to embrace change leaves societies vulnerable to the rise of authoritarian political ideologies, particularly during times of socioeconomic and political crises. Public schools have seen an increase in incidents where fundamentalist groups with differing agendas have attempted to pressure them into adopting curricula whose literacy…

This article explores the implications of a proposed move towards a religion and worldviews curriculum in England for contact-based interfaith programmes in schools, through a case study of the Faith and Belief Forum's School Linking programme. Quantitative and qualitative data collected through 1,488 teacher and student surveys, teacher focus…

Globalisation, migration, socio-political shifts, and access to the internet are increasing the religious and belief diversity of Irish society. This flux presents challenges for young people who are endeavouring to establish a secure identity. The focus of this research was to understand how the identity development of post-primary students of…

Religious diversity within Dutch schools has greatly increased. We carried out an empirical study to offer insights into how secondary school teachers (try to) relate to the formal Protestant Christian identity of their school, the challenges they experience in relation to their own personal worldview, and the recommendations they have to overcome…

Professional ideals arise from personal worldviews and specify teachers' professional identities. This study aimed to explore how faith is present in the professional ideals of Christian teachers. The professional ideals of 107 Dutch teachers from conservative Protestant primary and secondary schools were explored using an open-ended…

In this article, we examine how narratives of religious traditions are used as resources in religious education (RE) and compare practices from Evangelic Lutheran religious education (LRE) and Islamic religious education (IRE) in Finnish public schools. The sacredness of narratives from holy books entails that there can be contestations over their…

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…

The black church is influential in shaping health behaviors within African-American communities, yet few use evidence-based strategies for HIV prevention (abstinence, monogamy, condoms, voluntary counseling and testing, and prevention with positives). Using principles of grounded theory and interpretive description, we explored the social…

Although much done in the name of discipleship and theological education pronounces lofty goals, such as movement from orthodoxy to orthopraxy, in many cases mere doctrinal assent is assumed to reflect deep change. An analysis of discipleship, worldview theory, and certain cognitive approaches to education suggests that worldview-level…

This research focuses on the development and study of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) that support religious practices and the use of standpoint theory in ICT evaluation studies. Three phases makeup this work: formative studies to understand how megachurches, their members and leaders use ICT in ways tied to their Protestant…

This article contains the results of how a selected group of Finnish upper secondary students understand Lutheranism. The data consisted of 63 students' responses to a writing task together with complementary interviews of 11 students. The outcomes of phenomenographic analysis of variation in the students' understanding of Lutheranism are…