This paper contributes to the ongoing debate surrounding the place of 'worldviews' in Religious Education. We examine the British Commission on Religious Education proposal that the subject be renamed 'Religions and Worldviews' from the perspective of Worldview Theory and Critical Religious Education and make the following suggestions: (a) the…

Hermeneutical religious positions among Muslim educators vary in flexibility and openness to critical thought. Those within a school community may disagree on how Islam should be interpreted and practiced. In the light of this, who determines which expressions of the faith are acceptable in particular locations, and how? And what messages do these…

Within plural democracies, the concept of 'religious literacy' is commonly understood as denoting the knowledge, skills and understanding "vis-à-vis" religious diversity required of the citizen. In schools across Europe such learning is traditionally housed within Religious Education (RE), the aims of which are increasingly framed in…

According to literature, the classic "paideia" ideal, that is, the ideal of the well-rounded, fully educated, rational human being, has survived to this day, despite many historical and socio-cultural influences that impacted on it through the millennia. In the process, it has to a considerable extent retained its rationalistic bias, but…

Should the state provide religious education in public schools; if yes, what form should it take? I argue that alertness to epistemic injustices that religious persons can suffer can help us answer those questions and can provide grounds for fostering religious literacy. I argue that, if religious persons can suffer testimonial injustice, we…

This article represents a first attempt to analyze and synthesize the theological, hermeneutic, and educational insights of Joseph Sander Lukinsky, who was one of the foremost Jewish educational thinkers and master practitioners of recent times. Particular attention is paid to Lukinsky's theology of revelation, to his educational theory, his…

This article describes the contours of hermeneutical learning in the context of religious education. Hermeneutical learning is firstly distinguished from monoreligious learning and multireligious learning. Hermeneutical learning is based on a triple hermeneutic task: interpretation of text, context and the biography of the student, and avoids both…

Teachers' worldviews may impact their practice in terms of pedagogy, curriculum choices, and the value they assign to, or enthusiasm for, a curriculum subject. In England, Religious Education (RE) involves the teaching of religious and non-religious worldviews. RE teachers often lack training, subject knowledge, confidence or even desire to teach…

A hermeneutic-communicative model of religious education is proposed which is grounded in a Christian anthropology. The human person is presented as a 'fragile hermeneutical space'--consisting of a radical openness to reality, an essential indeterminateness and an ability to transcend his or her own reality. This means that people have an inbuilt…

In 2006 and then, seven years later in 2013, a small scaled research project was carried out into Christian children's developing perspectives as they encounter sacred text from the context of their home lives (Worsley in Br J Relig Educ 28(3):247-257, 2006, Br J Relig Educ 35(1):55-71, 2013). Fourteen years on in 2020, these same children and…

This article reports findings from a sacred text scholarship project in Religious Education/Religion and Worldviews (RE/RW) lessons. In the "Texts and Teachers" project secondary school teachers found that RE became more "meta" through a more scholarly treatment of texts, and led to "leap moments" with pupils who…

This qualitative study examines semi-structured interviews with four Norwegian teachers to explore how they teach biblical texts in upper secondary religious education (RE). The theoretical framework combines one model from biblical hermeneutics with one from RE. The former differentiates between the worlds behind, in, and in front of the biblical…

This study is about Jerusalem in the Bible and Al Quran based on eschatological paradigm (theology/philosophy), which uses two approaches: sociology (geographical and anthropological history analysis) and interpretation (hermeneutical analysis and bil ma'tsur interpretation). Jerusalem is the name of the Holy City of the Abrahamic Religions. This…

Disagreements about how Christianity should be taught in state-funded school RE have a long history. In this article we take England as a case study and examine the debates that have arisen about the legitimacy of a theologically based pedagogy following the publication of "Understanding Christianity," a resource inspired by recent…

A key epistemological assumption in the ideologies of many of the groups termed extremist is that there is an unmediated access to a Divine Will. Driven by this assumption, and facilitated by several other factors, a range of coercive actions (including violence) to force others into submission to the perceived Will of God are seen as justified by…