This article is a conceptual examination of tolerance and pedagogy with regard to the prevention of violence in the Arab world from a critical theory perspective. Tolerance is a socially and culturally bound system, indicating that any pedagogy of tolerance must be authentic to its context. Therefore, the value of adopting a nuanced Western…

This paper presents a study which was done to investigate schoolteachers' discourse on morality. The teachers used three dimensions to construct and present their discourse on morality: food, religion and relationship. These teachers were drawn from different types of private and public schools in Delhi, the capital of India. The teachers…

The Belgian Constitution holds an obligation for governmental schools to organise RE in the recognised religions and in non-confessional ethics for all children of school age. While neither the Flemish nor the French Community legislator can thus abandon RE altogether, both legislators have recently taken initiatives, moving beyond the opt-out…

This study was conducted in order to fill an existing gap within the field of religious education, specifically regarding standardisation within evangelical education aimed at teaching the youth within the church. There is currently no standardisation of education between sects nor within individual sects of evangelical Christianity, and this…

This research investigates Finnish teachers' personal worldviews, by focusing on understanding what kinds of approaches teachers use concerning the visibility of their personal worldviews in an educational context. This issue is discussed in the light of teachers' professional autonomy and ethics, since these are two fundamental dimensions of…

For some, religious education is a possibility to exercise religious freedom in its positive dimension, especially the freedom to receive a religious teaching. Others perceive religious education as a threat to negative religious freedom, namely the freedom not to be indoctrinated with religious matters. For a long time, the tension between these…

This article presents the findings of a qualitative interview study undertaken with RE teachers (n = 30), working in English schools with secondary status. Despite recent policy interest in character education, there is a lacuna of information about the extent RE contributes to character education. The present study focuses on teachers'…

Teachers are at risk to suffer from burnout and adverse mental health as a result of work-related stress and conflicts. The development of teacher resilience depends upon a complex interaction between extraneous factors (i.e. administrative and social support), and, intrinsic factors (i.e. personal values). Although it is known that personal faith…

Since 2009, there is a discussion about how RE should be organised in state and 'private' (mainly Catholic) schools in Flanders. Especially the proposal to introduce non-denominational and integrative RE for all pupils in all schools stimulated the debate. More than ten years later, the RE system, which is based on (semi-)confessional and in state…

This article interrogates family and religious studies in the context of religious leaders who serve as regime enablers and resistors in Zimbabwe. Some religious leaders have overtly or covertly assumed the role of enablers of the current Zimbabwean political matrix, thereby threatening democracy, social justice, and accountability, by using…

In Ireland primary RE is a fractured, contested, complex and changing territory devoid of a common language and characterised by a proliferation of syllabi and curricula generated for increasingly diverse school types. For centuries the dynamic decolonising process has led to a questioning of former orthodoxies and an attempted de-linking of the…

This article explores the implications for Christian religious education of the theory of moral virtues formulated by Thomas Aquinas and developed by the contemporary Neo-Thomists. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part introduces Thomistic virtue theory and presents cardinal virtues crucial for Thomistic ethics: prudence, justice,…

When Religious Education (RE) in England and Wales transitioned from Christian confessionalism to a multi-faith approach in the latter half of the twentieth century, the subject's moral aims were reasserted. In this article, we explore the moral assumptions of this transformation and map some of their connections to other theological and ethical…

This article reflects on the place of RE in a pillarised education context, taking into account the fact of religious diversity and pluralisation among the school population on the one hand, and the freedom of religion and education of faith-based schools on the other. Particular attention will be given to Belgium and the Netherlands, which do not…

Different religions are treated in different ways in Norwegian sixth form textbooks. We carried out an exhaustive content analysis of the chapters devoted to individual religions in textbooks for the Religion and Ethics course currently available in Norway, using rigorous indicators to code each word, image and question according to whether they…