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Spirituality can be understood within both a religious and secular context. Fuelled by the controversy that surrounds different understandings of human identity and notions of progress, knowledge and truth in modernist and postmodernist contexts, the concept of spirituality is a hotly contested topic of debate as to its relevance within contemporary culture and its meaning within religious traditions. This book aims to inform readers on this debate and contextualize it within these different frames of reference. It approaches the topic of spirituality with an identification of the major influences on contemporary thinking and presents a coherent framework of understanding that links divergent thinking into a common goal. Writings range across different thinkers and practitioners within established religious tradition, contemporary movements and those who operate within psychological and 'secular' understandings. Focusing on the question 'what does it mean to be human?' this engaging study attempts to overcome the divide between secular and religious understandings of spirituality.
Christian-Jewish relations have had changing fortunes throughout the centuries. Occasionally there has been peace and even mutual understanding, but usually these relations have been ones of tension, often involving recrimination and even violence. This volume addresses a number of the major questions that have been at the heart and the periphery of these tenuous relations through the years. The volume begins with a number of papers discussing relations as Christianity emerged from and defined itself in terms of Judaism. Other papers trace the relations through the intervening years. And a number of papers confront issues that have been at the heart of the troubled twentieth century. In all, these papers address a sensitive yet vital set of issues from a variety of approaches and perspectives, becoming in their own way a part of the ongoing dialogue.
Religious Education as a Dialogue with Difference addresses current issues over the study of religion in publicly maintained schools. Are liberal, inclusive approaches to the study of religion suited to the aims of education in a democracy? Do liberal democratic aims offer the right framework for the study of religion? By presenting research on English secondary school pupils' motivation in religious education, this volume argues that religious education is best understood as a democratic dialogue with difference. The book offers empirical evidence for this claim, and it demonstrates how learners gain in religious literacy, both through the exercise of democratic citizenship in the classroom and towards the goal of life-long democratic citizenship.
In order to draw out the relationship between publicly-oriented Christianity and education, this book demonstrates that education is an important method and prerequisite of public theology, as well as an urgent object of public theology research’s attention. Featuring work from diverse academic disciplines—including religion education, theology, philosophy, and religious studies—this edited collection also contends with the educational challenges that come with the decline of religion on the one hand and its transformation and regained public relevance on the other. Taken together, the contributions to this volume provide a comprehensive argument for why education deserves systematic attention in the context of public theology discourse, and vice versa.
MasterClass in Religious Education provides a comprehensive exploration of the major themes in religious education research and pedagogy, drawing on international research. The author draws together historical, theological/religious and comparative and international perspectives to explore religious education's role in confronting controversial issues, and the implications this has for teaching, learning and research. This book incorporates discussions of current, post-9/11 debates on religion in the modern world, focusing particularly on the relationship of religion to secular, political contexts. Liam Gearon pays close attention to debates around religion in liberal democratic societies, looking at topics such as citizenship, human rights, and identity.
This book brings together new thinking and research on religious education’s complex and evolving role in the multicultural, diverse postmodern era. It facilitates new realism and understanding of the current situation from empirical and reflective accounts relating to a variety of countries and political contexts, as well as providing innovative methodological approaches to the study of education and religion. In different contexts around the world, at different levels of education, and from different theoretical lenses, religious education occupies a contested space. The ongoing, changing nature of the world due to increasing secularization, rapid technological change, mass immigration, globalization processes, conflict and challenging security issues, from inter to intra state levels, and with shifting geopolitical power balances, generates the need to reconceptualize where religious education is positioned. It claims that religious education on its own can be an agent of moral, social and spiritual transformation are disputed. There is significant controversy about whether special religious education, that is in-faith education, still has a role within the post-modern world.
Religion has had notable and renewed prominence in contemporary public and political life. Religious questions have also been freshly examined in philosophy and theology, the natural sciences, the social sciences, psychology, phenomenology, politics and the arts. These fields reflect complex, multi-disciplinary understandings of religion, some hostile, some accommodating. For religious education this has all contributed to its own international renaissance. Religious education, in ensuring it is contemporary, shares with these fields the same criticality, the same distance between the study of religion and the religious life. Yet what are the grounds of this modern religious education? Throu...
The "Theology in Dialogue" Series explores the relationship between theology and different, secular academic disciplines which appear within the degree programs of colleges and universities. Each volume begins with a chapter and a reply, providing a thoughtful justification for the interaction of theology and the particular subject. This is followed by a theoretical analysis of this interaction, and a range of case studies illustrating the situation in the classroom. "English Literature, Theology and the Curriculum" explores the nature and authority of religious writings and their influence on secular literature. What makes it distinctive is the manner in which it investigates the textual dy...
Providing a critical and contentious overview of the fundamental relationship between writing and political dissent from early Greek democracy to post-Enlightenment forms of totalitarianism, through to modern forms of liberal democracy based upon universal human rights.
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