How might we bring our full selves, including our bodies, to the enterprise of teaching and learning? How might queer lived experience inform the development of a full-bodied pedagogy? Drawing on personal reflection, this article explores the use of eros, desire, and passion found in queer experience and connects them to contemplative spiritual…

In this article, the author John Volk, professor of Worldview Studies at Renaissance College, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, looks forward toward the November 2017 Religious Education Association Conference, which is entitled "Learning in Encounter: Crossroads, Connections, Collaborations", and says that…

Recognition is the main word attached to multicultural perspectives. The multicultural call for recognition, the one calling for the recognition of cultural minorities and identities, the one now voiced by liberal states all over and also in Israel was a more difficult one. It took the author some time to realize that calling for the recognition…

Historian of religions Charles Long uses the term "American cultural language" to identify discursive challenges to democracy and social justice in the Unites States. The American cultural language, Long says, is the "misinterpretation" of humanness and freedom conveyed when the term "American"--used to signify…

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…

This article responds to sociologist Christian Smith's claim that many teenagers today have lost traditional religious faith and instead espouse a new and erroneous faith in God the "Cosmic Therapist." The author challenges this claim by comparing two of Smith's chief complaints vis-a-vis teen faith to established portraits of adolescent faith.…

Long before the author answered the call to become a rabbi, he brought his passion to teach to the waterfront--that special place where the waters of a river or lake meet the dry land. Today, the author still imagines himself learning and teaching others how to swim, not in the water, but in the flows of global culture, to use the language of this…

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…

One of the author's most vivid and early memories of "learning about religion" comes from when she was in seventh grade, and her math teacher scolded her and her friend for arguing about religion in the back of the room. Both of them were deeply steeped in family religious practice, and new to each other's traditions. That experience was…

In this article, the author shares how his dissatisfaction with religion textbooks led him to use novels as texts for his religion classes. Among the novels that he used were "To A God Unknown" by John Steinbeck, "The Stranger" by Albert Camus, "A Burnt-Out Case" by Graham Greene, "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M. Miller, Jr., and "Franny…

After having seen Jody Picoult's "Plain Truth," which is on the paperback best-seller list from "New York Times Book Review," and an ad for a novel called "A Version of the Truth," in this article the author talks about truth and how it is being told by some writers from a different point of view. It seems that truth is everywhere, and also…

The art of fiction tells truth because it is the truth of life that goes into making good fiction: love, hate, fear, courage, delight, sorrow, betrayal, loyalty, confusion, choice, circumstance, luck, injustice. These essential qualities, says the author, are also the qualities of sound theology, with a sense of time and place; and raising…

This article sets Dorothy Bass' Christian practices movement in critical dialogue with U.S. Latina/o popular religion in order to explore ways that these distinctive sets of practices could enrich one another. Then, it focuses on "shaping communities" as a Christian practice and correlates it with the U.S. Latina/o popular religious…

In the face of the globalizing tendencies of our times, religious communities will depend on the appropriations and reinterpretations of traditions in constant dialogue with increasingly diverse cultural groups. Religious communities that want to respond to the challenge of cultural pluralism cannot hold to the idea of religion as something…