In this article, author Trevor Cooling presents a review of three books that disseminate recent research on religious schools. The first, "Leadership and Religious Schools: International Perspectives and Challenges," edited by Michael T. Buchanan, is an edited volume of essays about leadership in religious schools. Editor Michael…

There are a range of communities within the Anglican communion that seek to maintain a more orthodox or Catholic emphasis. One of these is the Traditional Anglican Communion. In 2009 the Vatican announced a special accommodation to allow these Anglicans to enter the Catholic Church and to retain key aspects of their Anglican usage and practice. As…

Divided into four parts, the article explores the relationship between literature and faith. The first part examines the connection between literature and the pursuit of truth and the second shows that literature can offer a challenging encounter with different beliefs. Part three examines some examples of the imagination at work in illuminating…

Assuming religious education to be the same as other subject areas of a Catholic school's curriculum by, for example, applying the outcomes based philosophy and language of other subject areas to religious education renders a category mistake. A prominent notion in the work of metaphysical philosopher Gilbert Ryle, a category mistake arises when…

In common with a number of recent studies of religious change that have taken a gendered approach, this article takes older women as its focus and considers the role the emotions play in religious change, adopting Riis and Woodhead's new conceptual framework of religious emotion. Emotions, they argue, are not merely private, personal and…

This article reports on a study of volunteer levels of Catholics from various World regions who attended an international youth Catholic festival. Volunteering levels, types of volunteering, reason for volunteering, Catholic group membership and pro-social values are analysed. An online survey was administered five months after the Festival to…

In 1999, a new curriculum for Roman-Catholic religious education was introduced in Flemish primary and secondary schools, taking into account both the growing de-Christianisation and religious pluralisation of pupils in the classroom. Recently, this new curriculum has been subjected to diverging criticisms: first it is considered still too…

The present article highlights one of the challenges faced by the Catholic Church in maintaining the Catholicity of Catholic schools in England, that is to say, the students' construction of a fragmented Catholic identity from elements of the Catholic faith tradition. The article explores Catholic students' perceptions of their Catholic identity.…

The particular history, politics, social milieu and size of the islands of Malta contributed to the formation of specific cultural values and identity. Central to this identity is a unique language and a very strong Catholic community. These factors remain integral (but not exclusive) aspects of the Maltese national identity. This identity has…

Early childhood educators have for some time now questioned approaches to education that focus solely on the development of thinking and rational cogitation, and have begun to favour dispositional frameworks in preference to learning frameworks. However, there is little evidence to suggest that dispositional frameworks have been utilised in…

Fisher's spiritual well-being (SWB) questionnaires assessed students' levels of relationship in four domains, namely with themselves, others, the environment and with a Transcendent Other (commonly called God). Students also reported the extent to which different entities helped them develop relationships in the four domains of SWB. However,…

In three Canadian provinces Catholic schools receive full government funding. This funding is premised on Catholic schools providing a distinctive educational environment based on the religious beliefs and practices of, among others, the teachers who work in these schools. A variety of official documents underline this notion of teachers playing…

Aggregated attainment data for each of the four Key Stages of the National Curriculum during 2006-07 are used to compare the performance of schools having differing proportions of ethnic minority pupils on roll. The data are for all maintained primary and secondary schools that completed the 2007 Annual Schools' Census. There are noticeable…

The question explored in this article is whether religious schools can contribute to the formation of the civic virtues in pupils by means of citizenship education. It is commonly agreed that civic virtues are needed in pluriform Western societies to promote social cohesion and reduce hostile attitudes. However, some argue that religious schools…

How do pupils in dialogical classroom communication understand the otherness of peers who belong to religions different from their own? We distinguish between three aspects of dialogical communication that are conducive to understanding pupils' otherness: orientation, appropriation, and evaluation. To what extent do teachers apply these three…