Barabbas has a small role in the Gospels, but his presence influences the way the Christian story has been told and received over the centuries. While he is mentioned in all four Gospels during the account of Jesus' Roman trial, he never appears "on-stage" in the Gospels. His main purpose is to exculpate the Romans of responsibility for…

The 2018 Religious Education Council of England and Wales' review of Religious Education proposes that the subject should be reframed as Religion & Worldviews. Although follow-up studies have explored this idea in some depth, comparatively little thought has been given to the exploration of "personal" worldviews. This paper explores…

Tensions across religious and LGBTQ concerns have played out in education for some time. In this paper, I make efforts to respond productively to this context by theorising what it might mean for young people in religious schools to dissent from the heteronormativity of religion in religious education (RE). To do this, I survey perspectives across…

Pope Francis met representatives of the Indigenous peoples of Canada in Rome in April 2022 and in Canada in July 2022. At these meetings he offered sincere apologies for the ways in which the Catholic Church had colluded with the strategy of cultural assimilation of the Indigenous people in Canada. This was especially abhorrent in the residential…

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…

Spirituality may not be able to be defined precisely but a number of models can be proposed which all recognise key sensitivities and experiences. Spirituality needs to be understood as being broader than the religious and should inform the whole curriculum and school ethos, if not the general concept of Secondary Education itself. To understand…

In 2018, the Québec Ethics and Religious Culture program celebrated its 10th anniversary. The launching of this program in schools in 2008 can be seen as the final step in a profound reorganization and a related deconfessionalization of the Québec educational system, a shift considered necessary to adapt school curricula to the present Québec…