Religious education (RE) is arguably one of the most legislated curriculum areas anywhere in the world, and yet in countries where legislation and educational policy exist to support its provision, how schools implement the subject in practice has not received much attention in the discourse. This article attempts to address this lacuna by…

After an elaboration of the paradigm shift concerning religious education in Europe, we will give a critical presentation of the Belgian and Flemish system of religious education. The article continues with a discussion of diverse proposals to change the religious education system in Flanders, and concludes that the introduction of an independent,…

In this article, the emerging field of youth ministry research is presented and interpreted through the lens of practical theology. International developments are described and compared as local responses to the ongoing global dynamics of youth culture. After an overview of four different contexts in which youth ministry research can be situated,…

The very complicated nature of interpretation, in general, and ambiguities involved in Derrida's writings, in particular, makes it very difficult to hold what Derrida means by deconstruction. As Biesta and Miedema (2011, 105) state: "One of the main challenges here is to get the interpretation of Derrida's writings 'right.'" Surely, by putting…

The question whether the writings of Jacques Derrida have anything to offer for religious education is, in the authors' opinion, a very important one. In their attempts at answering the question, the authors have tried to argue that the writings of Derrida provide openings that speak to both theology and education in a way that is not only…

Twenty-five years ago the author was taking a required class in neuropsychology in which students were introduced to the amazing structure and functions of the brain. During the very last class session, exams completed, students were relaxed, and by then had enough basic information to ask interesting questions. The author ventured a question…

The author's specialization as a Christian theologian is in the combined area of morality and spirituality. The focus of his teaching and research has been in the areas of bioethics; the theology of sexuality, marriage, and the family; and Christian spirituality. In his research he came across several authors who advocated some positions different…

The argument of this article is that the recent writing of Jurgen Habermas concerning the boundary of public reason offers the following advantages over the classic "liberal proviso": (1) It releases religious citizens from an undue cognitive burden; (2) It distributes the cognitive burden of justification symmetrically across the citizenry; and…

This article offers a response to two provocative questions about the relationship of theology to religious education posed by Norma Thompson in her Presidential address given at the annual meeting of APRRE in 1978. I offer contemporary answers to these questions from the perspective of a theological educator. First, I show how feminist theory and…

In this essay, originally written as the presidential address for the 2009 REA:APPRRE annual meeting, the author explores possibilities for naming and responding to Divine presence with reference to postmodern categories and contemporary narratives. She draws on descriptions of God as "interrupting" history, the dialectic of "chronos" and "kairos"…

In this article a comparison is drawn between the way in which the pragmatist philosopher and pedagogue John Dewey addressed religious issues and his view on Religious Education in his poetic narratives and in his scholarly writings, especially in his "magnus opus" on religion, "A Common Faith". Do we gain deeper insight into Dewey's view on…

The author believes that the future of learning religion and religiously learning does not primary depend on new methods or medias transferring faith or religiosity to people's lives. It depends more on a change of theological awareness and of people's ways of theologizing in the midst of cultural flow in order to get a deeper understanding of the…

Starting his work as endowed Hendrik Pierson Professor for Christian Education at VU University Amsterdam in 1993 the author focused on the relationship of education, pedagogy, and religion. However, his attention was rather exclusively directed to Protestant schools. The argument was that in academia at that time, even in the faculties of…

This article examines some of the pertinent challenges arising out of personal experiences encountered through teaching religion and theology within an African environment. What the author describes as the "new Africa" in his title is a continent that has transitioned from slavery and colonialism into a global fraternity of democratic governance,…

There are many pitfalls associated with teaching about religions. One such pitfall entails the risk of presenting religions as stereotypical monolithic systems; that is, all who belong to a particular religious tradition think and act in the same way. I like to call this sort of stereotyping the "robotic tendency" because it has a habit…