Education is a fundamental human right crucial for individual growth and societal progress. In Somalia, modern education started during the colonial era with a focus on producing clerical workers for the colonial administration. Western Christian missionaries arrived to establish "modern schools," but suspicions of Westernization and…

Sacred teaching takes many forms across religious traditions, focusing on creation and sacramentality in Christianity, God's nature and creation of human beings in Judaism, and spiritual and social practices in both. At the heart of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions are accents on the sacredness of life, creation in the image of God, and…

Drawing on research in deliberative pedagogy, this paper will develop in depth one piece of a larger project that envisions peace education as an essential component of youth ministry. The paper proposes a sacred pedagogy that engages theological concepts through deliberative, democratic discussion, teaching young people skills in engaging across…

Informed by interpretive phenomenological analysis and sociocultural theory, this study examines the language experiences of seven Methodist youth. Analysis of 9 months of observations and 30 interviews yielded a set of experiences that represent the intimacy and complexity of youths' religious discourses. As an essential feature of this…

This article describes a seminar I taught on Christianity and colonialism. I wanted to introduce students to some content while also allowing them to practice some of the expert skills that we use in religious studies, and more specifically in my own sub-discipline, the anthropology of religion. In particular, I wanted to make more visible some of…

This article examines identity development in light of Charles Taylor's notion of the "Buffered Self." Educating in faith toward the deconstruction of unjust identity norms requires finding a pathway out of this constrictive underlying structure. In particular, the manner in which religious educators address the promises and perils that…

The affordances of the comic book medium facilitate individual, interpretive readings of narrative and as such challenge the notion of a single message or meaning. This article explores how secondary school students encounter and re-orientate themselves to personal concepts of religious and educational authority and authenticity as a consequence…

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…

This article critically reviews the European religious education landscape and argues that a religious notion of religion prevails in most models, not only in confessional RE but also in integrative models and even in so-called alternative subjects that are compulsory for pupils who do not take part in confessional RE. Thus, schools in Europe…

This article considers the high significance of the Russian Orthodox Church's system of religious education, which is currently being built in the Russian Federation. The great value of this system is due to the fact that Orthodoxy has historically been the most massive and important religion in Russia. Sunday schools are examined as a form of…

In this article, the authors reflect on the results of their previous research at cooperation schools in the Netherlands, where students and teachers from nonaffiliated and Christian backgrounds come together. Dewey's perspective on educating democratic values is combined with empirical results of this research, answering the question what Dewey's…

Conciliar and post-conciliar documents provide a consistent stream of inspirational and informative directions for Catholic Education. This study explores the thematic constants within and across these releases, specifically in relation to the mission of the Catholic school. A series of Leximancer analyses, digital data mining processes of…

The term "self-directed learning" has since its seminal definition in 1975 by Malcolm S. Knowles acquired a range of meanings, which has led to communication difficulties about this subject. Examination of self-directed learning from a biblical ontological-anthropological perspective reveals that, although the notion of self-directed…

During the twentieth century, an increasing amount of data was collected in connection with engineering of the modern states including their education systems. In the Nordic welfare states post WW2, such data were also generated in experimental projects aiming at reforming curriculum and education, and the data were accumulated either as…

This study was conducted in order to fill an existing gap within the field of religious education, specifically regarding standardisation within evangelical education aimed at teaching the youth within the church. There is currently no standardisation of education between sects nor within individual sects of evangelical Christianity, and this…