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 study explored how individuals spoke about the dissonance they experienced due to their own intersections of identity within religious and/or spiritual spaces in their communities and on college campuses. In addition, we as researchers sought to understand how discourse may or may not have challenged the idea of dissonance as a negative…

While much of the work on language, policy, and religion has focused on how discourse is influenced by policy, this article presents a case study of how discourse is used to construct policy itself. These policy-making discourses tend to occur in institutional settings; however, non-institutional discourse may also be instrumental in the…

This article examines social practices within classroom discourse in two different Finnish religious educational contexts. The article critically observes the construction of certain positions and identities as part of the school discourse and the inclusive vs exclusive practices of language. The research material consists of classroom…

This article deals with religious discourse in modern history school textbooks in Ukraine that cover early modern times in Ukrainian history. It analyzes the place of religious discourse within national discourse, the correlation between local Ukrainian religious and more general discourse, and the representation of the relationships between…

The article presents a method for analysing recurring curriculum documents using discourse theory inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The article includes a presentation of the method in seven practical steps, and is illustrated and discussed throughout using the author's recent case study on religion, identity and values in Norwegian…

This dissertation examines the development of the Old English vocabulary for fear under the influence of the Latinate discourse of Christian doctrine. The first chapter arranges the Old English words for fear into etymologically organized families and describes their incidence and usage across attested corpus of Old English, using the Dictionary…

This essay considers how a male evangelical Christian in a first-year writing (FYW) course at a state university negotiates his identity in his academic writing for a non-Christian audience. It focuses on how "Austin" casuistically stretches a biblical text to accommodate his audience's pluralistic perspective. Austin's writing thus provides a…

Conversion narratives in the form of testimony are powerful means of consolidating and strengthening one's new religious identity (Beit-Hallahmi, Prolegomena to the psychological study of religion, Bucknell University Press, 1989; Rambo, Understanding religious conversion, Yale University Press, 1993; Stromberg 1993, as cited in Emmons &…

Religious sermons play a very significant role in a pluralist setting like Nigeria, as organs of social, political and moral education. The fulfilment of these functions is partly contingent on the effective use of language. If the sermon-giver and his audience draw from the same pool of lexis, communication in the genre will not only be enhanced…

The Republican education, its concepts, theories, and form of discourse belong to the shared European heritage of the pre-modern Age. The pedagogy of humanism and its effects on the early Modern Age are represented by Republicanism. Even if Republicanism found a political continuation in liberalism and democratism of the Modern Age, the same…

In a teaching context fraught with conflicts on religious and ethnic backgrounds, I decide as a teacher researcher to address these issues with Israeli-Arab middle school students in my EFL classroom. Picture books on religious diversity and minority issues are used as a springboard for providing spaces for students to discuss these issues orally,…

This book discusses some of the functions, ends, or goals that language serves in religion; the various kinds of linguistic resources that are exploited; and some of the social processes that characterize the use of language. In section one, "Performance," three approaches to the description of verbal behavior are contrasted. This…