Knowledge and Truth in Religious Education

It is reasonable to expect, with regard to any traditional academic subject, that it should be capable of being made good sense of as a rational form of knowledge or enquiry focused upon the discernment of truths of one sort or another concerning the world or human affairs. One curriculum area which has generally been held to be problematic in this respect, for a mixture of epistemological, social, ethical and pedagogical reasons, is that of religious education. In the first place, then, this paper is concerned to expose some of the confusions which have been allowed to obscure the nature of religious enquiry as a viable rational enterprise, Second, however, the paper also attempts to develop a coherent und workable account of the nature and operations of knowledge and truth in religious enquiry.