‘Who’s Afraid of Secularisation?’ A Response to David Lewin

This response to David Lewin states the purpose of my critique of some aspects of Liam Gearon’s work. It clarifies my position on the aims of ‘inclusive’ religious education, rejecting Gearon’s view that REDCo researchers shared a common pluralistic theology, regarding religious education as having a single political aim. It reinforces Gearon’s misrepresentation of the development of the Toledo Guiding Principles. In addressing the concern that religious education serves political ends, I acknowledge that much educational discourse has a political dimension but, in the case of ‘inclusive’ religious education, I argue that an approach based on John Rawls’ view of political liberalism can facilitate understanding of religions. I respond to Lewin’s assumption that my own view of religious language is entirely propositional and I compare the view of religious language expressed by Morimoto, quoted with approval by Lewin, with that of D. Z. Phillips, noting that its adoption implies that religious ‘insiders’ and those with no religious commitments are incapable of mutual understanding. I introduce the interpretive approach as an impartial methodology for religious education. Finally, I invite Lewin to engage with empirical research informing European policy on religious education, relevant to issues of secularity and secularism.     

Religious education as a research discipline: an activity theoretical perspective

This article raises the question of how to conceive of religious education as a research discipline. The theory of activity systems is used in an analysis of the relationship between theory and practice, the systems of research and the systems of school. The author argues for a dialectical relationship between research and school practice, where understandings of school practice may enable theoretical expansion and where the language used in the field of research may give renewed understanding to the field of practice.     

Professor Ninian Smart,phenomenology and religious education

I reply to L. Philip Barnes’ assessment of the contributions of Ninian Smart and phenomenology to religious education. My argument is that Barnes first misconceives and then underestimates Smart’s legacy. I sketch Smart’s relevance to some current issues in religious education, suggesting that his thought helps us to avoid potentially damaging polarisations (of language and concepts to experience, and of learning about religion to learning from religion). I conclude that Smart may have little to say about classroom practice, but should still be a reference point for any practitioner.     

Learning for Life or Learning from Books: Reading Practices in Mexican Rural Schools (1900 to 1935)

This article furthers our understanding of the uses of textbooks within the complex social history of school cultures. It focuses on rural schools in an indigenous region of central Mexico, before and after the Mexican revolution (1910‐1921). Two contextual factors are highlighted. First, the gradual displacement of the native language by the dominant Spanish used in schools. Secondly, the pedagogical discourses that discouraged the use of textbooks in teaching and stressed ‘learning for life’. These circumstances shed light on the fragmentary evidence of available textbooks and actual classroom practice. I suggest that the period witnessed a shift in classroom cultures, from the intensive reading of religious and moral texts that were possibly familiar to the children, towards the extensive, silent reading of textbooks on a variety of subjects. However, native children had still to bridge a considerable gap between their own life and language and the printed Spanish they encountered in schools.     

Education and the Religious Thinker

This paper is concerned with the process of religious thinking as a linguistic form of investigating the world of values, which stands in contrast to theology and religious studies. It hinges around Wittgenstein’s comment, “I am not a religious man but I cannot help but see every question from a religious point of view.” It argues that scientific modes of thought are now so dominant that values education of all types are distorted as science itself was once distorted in an age when theological language held sway. The result today is the worrying growth of what is usually termed fundamentalism or literalism. The paper introduces the thinking on this issue from the curriculum theories of the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, which have been ignored for nearly two centuries, before examining the work of a modern scholar, Christopher Arthur. Finally Whitehead’s insights arising from his later works are brought into play to conclude the argument.     

Liberal Education and the Teleological Question; or Why Should a Dentist Read Chaucer?

This essay consists of an examination of the work of three thinkers who conceive of liberal education primarily in teleological terms, and, implicitly if not explicitly, attempt to offer some answer to the question: what does it mean to be fully human? John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Josef Pieper developed their understanding of liberal education from their own intellectual and religious experience, which was informed by a specifically Christian conception of the place of education in a fully developed human life. I suggest that the strength of their understanding of liberal education derives from its connection to the various small cohesive religious communities to which they were connected. Nonetheless, this insularity was also the primary weakness because each writer ended universalising what was in fact a particular and unique cultural and religious experience instead of providing convincing proof of a single human nature with a single telos. I will contrast this teleological conception of liberal education with that of Michael Oakeshott and his student Kenneth Minogue, both of whom wrote about education in a post‐religious era in which the earlier consensus had completely broken down. They both celebrated the variety of practices which human beings have invented for themselves over the past several centuries (and past several millennia), and did not appear to suffer from the lack of any unifying single human telos. I will suggest that their understanding of practice insulated them from the need for a single unifying telos.     

从翻译的“文化转向”看对外汉语教学的文化自觉

对外汉语教学作为第二语言教学,与第一语言的教学过程最大的不同,就在于第二语言教学和学习需要进行跨文化与跨语际的交流。这一特点决定了对外汉语教学是一种＂翻译＂实践。近年来翻译学科的＂文化转向＂尤其是有关＂翻译政治＂的讨论,势必对对外汉语学科的自我认同与自我理解产生重要的启示。能否在对外汉语教学中形成一种文化自觉,将对外汉语教学理解为一种重要的文化传播手段,已成为决定对外汉语教学——汉语国际推广成败的关键。     

论中西方色彩象征意义的差别及其成因

色彩是一种语言,是传达信息的无声语言。色彩是刺激视觉最巧妙、最敏感、最敏锐的语言。由于感知的生理机制不同,人们对色彩的理解也不尽相同。但不同民族不同文化背景的人对同种色彩的理解也有所不同。这是由于不同民族在地理环境、历史背景、宗教信仰、文化风俗、心理以及思维方式等方面的不同而使色彩所蕴涵的意义产生差异。在各种语言词汇里有大量的色彩词,除了表达色彩之外,它们有更深刻的文化内涵。     

Y. W. C. A. AND GIRLS

This design experiment in prayer education for Jewish students was motivated by a current educational concern: educating for spirituality and religious practice. Educators are tasked with formally nurturing spirituality (Wright 2001). It is known that attitude to religious observance may change during adolescence (Hyde 1963), thus attitude to prayer needs attention. The effects/consequences of prayer understanding reach beyond religious practice itself, to encompass issues of faith, identity, spiritual development and well-being (Sigel 2009). Here quantitative and qualitative analysis is used to measure the effects of a tefillah (prayer and its understanding) course on student attitudes to prayer.     

Spiritual Language and the Ethics of Redemption: a Reply to Jim Mackenzie

I argue in this paper that Jim Mackenzie's critique of my recent work on religious and spiritual education fails on two main counts. First, his imputation to me of a confessional approach to religious education is simply misdirected, insofar as my previous papers are quite clearly concerned to sketch an alternative to both confessional and phenomenological approaches. Secondly, his attempt to reduce my 'spiritual truths' to moral and other claims turns on some question-begging decontextualisation of such judgements, as well as upon demonstrable ambiguities in his use of the terms 'moral' and 'soul'. In particular, I argue that the language of spirituality is indexed to an 'ethics of redemption' which is clearly distinguishable from any discourse of secular morality.     

文化中的性别歧视及其在英语语言中的反映

Franz Boas认为语言是由文化决定的。作为文化的重要组成部分，语言反映文化而且是理解英语文化中的性别歧视的关键。试图从劳动分工，宗教意识和早期教育的角度分析性别歧视的起源，同时从文化出发讨论性别歧视并描述其在语言中的反映。     

Imaginative Engagement with Religious Diversity in Public School Classrooms

Helping students learn how to engage thoughtfully with religious diversity is a vital component of democratic citizenship. This article argues for the importance of such a curriculum and considers the challenges and potential inherent in fostering “imaginative engagement” with religion in public school classrooms. It first explores conceptual issues such as our capacity for empathic understanding and whether it is appropriate to use students as sources of “insider understanding” of religious perspectives. It then evaluates three common curricular choices for stirring the ethical imagination in students: role plays, field experiences, and the use of art and literature.     

Social worlds and religious education in Poland: towards the elimination of disharmony

ABSTRACT

The goal of this article is to present the coherence between the human social world and religious education in Poland. The motive for taking up this subject is the cultural context relating to the problem of attitudes towards refugees. Reconstruction of the worlds of life demands to be expanded to include the religious education context in order to adapt the education practice to the requirements and expectations of the social environment. This has been achieved based on secondary analysis of the source texts (pedagogical, sociological and theological) and existing research results, which refer directly to the practice of lifelong religious education and concern applications in the area of shaping social competences and the developmental effort of Polish thinking and understanding. These include: (1) Dissemination of the pedagogical category of decentration; (2) Resignation in the practice of religious education from universalistic apriority and realistic ontology, and the implementation of hermeneutics of understanding to religious education and a new model – supra-confessional, pluralistic model open to the knowledge of other religions and beliefs systems; and (3) Develop competences for an internal dialogue. For the practice of lifelong learning, this means abandoning the alienated learning culture and carrying out this process within the community.     

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY

This article suggests that religious education discourse in the future must be multilingual if it is to prepare people to participate in a postmodern world of religious diversity and secularism. Five “languages” are suggested, including those native to the religious education of particular religious communities, the language of interreligious education, the language of public religious education, a postreligion religious education language, and the language of academic religious education.     

On the grammar of religious discourse and education

If it is generally true that skewed educational policies and practices often follow from more fundamental epistemic or semantic misconstruals of the logical character of particular forms of human enquiry, this would seem to be especially true of religious education. This paper sets out to identify and expose some of the dubious philosophical assumptions underlying latter day conceptions of religious discourse and education — as apparent, for example, in tensions between literalist and expressivist readings of religious discourse and confessional and non-confessional approaches to religious education. In short, whilst this paper rejects literalist interpretations of religious discourse (and any consequent religious fundamentalism) in favour of a non-literalist conception of religious narratives as epistemically continuous with forms of imaginative human art and literature, it also rejects idealist, social constructivist and relativist interpretations of story in favour of a realist account of religious and other serious cultural literature as truth-focused forms of objective human enquiry, knowledge and understanding. On this view, although the language of religious narrative is no less metaphorical, analogical and/or figurative than that of great poetry, it is — no less than great poetry — concerned to disclose quite objective aspects or dimensions of spiritual, moral and metaphysical reality. The paper concludes with some observations on contemporary challenges of religious education.     

马克思主义宗教观研究述评

20世纪八九十年代，学术界遵循“学术需理性，信仰要宽容”的原则开展宗教研究。如何理解“宗教是人民的鸦片”这句话，是学术界争论最为激烈的核心问题。长期以来，“鸦片论”一直作为我国宗教工作和宗教研究的出发点和最终归宿，甚至把它概括为马克思主义宗教观的理论根本。其实，“鸦片”是马克思承袭前人的提法，是对宗教在阶级社会中一定条件下所起消极作用的形象化比喻，不能把它归结为马克思主义宗教观。马克思主义宗教观是制定宗教政策的理论依据，而宗教信仰自由政策是马克思主义宗教观在实践中运用的结果。“积极引导宗教与社会主义社会相适应”的思想，充分体现了实事求是的精神，堪称对马克思主义宗教观理论的创造性发展。     

The Two Contested Concepts of Culture and Tradition in Religious Education

Culture and tradition are two highly contested concepts in religious education. Grounding their theoretical contribution in concrete practice, the authors begin with a report on a summer camp with young adults and analyze that experience in light of concepts of culture and tradition, focusing on participation and transformation as two core characteristics. Finally, the relationship of culture and tradition and religious education is dealt with using a Peircean, abductive line of interpretation as an alternative way of understanding the dynamic relationship of culture and tradition.     

从英语诗歌看中西文化

诗歌是一个国家语言的浓缩，它以最凝炼的文字传递了时间与空间、物质与精神、理智与情感，其中的文化因素是理解和欣赏诗歌的关键。本文试图从中西方在地理位置、宗教信仰、传统文化渊源、语言的发展历程、历史文化特色与思维方式等方面的差异来说明文化因素在英语诗歌理解与欣赏中的重要作用。