Religious education

About: Religious education is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9554 publications have been published within this topic receiving 65331 citations. The topic is also known as: faith-based education & RE.

Religious Humanitarianism and the Global Politics of Secularism

Abstract: The director of a Christian transnational humanitarian organization in New York asserts that the “development model” is more rooted in Gospel teachings than the “charity model.” A new wave of Muslim NGO activists from Somalia, Iraq, and Palestine call themselves secular, while Christians working in the same areas do not hesitate to discuss their religious roots and motivations. Many Cameroonian humanitarian workers from mainline religious denominations also observe traditional African religious customs, even though they experience considerable conflict between the two. How do we make sense of these and other practices within existing religious/secular categories? What are the parameters of our “secular age” within the “desecularization of the world”? This question might be posed in the inverse by many authors in this volume, in order to ask about the parameters of desecularization within our secular age. Given the constitutive nature of my argument, however, I note the interchangeability of the question. This paper questions the boundaries between the secular and the religious in international affairs. In particular, it assesses how these categories work to produce assumptions about the nature of religious and secular beliefs and actions, and whether they provide adequate conceptual space to capture the kinds of practices and understandings of contemporary religious humanitarians. The boundaries between the religious and the secular are often assumed to be fixed, although the contributions to this volume demonstrate that they are anything but. I draw on in-depth interviews of activists from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on humanitarianism broadly-conceived in Central and East Africa, the Middle East, and New York, to analyze the implications of contemporary religious/secular intersections for international affairs. The interpretations and actions that result often can be construed as inherently “religious” or inherently “secular.” I argue that religious ethics and action in a secular world, or secular ethics and action in a religious world, are constitutive constructs. They rework each other constantly, but the intersection of local contexts with global discourses and practices, including those of the “war on terror” and the liberal market, produces trends which can be identified and analyzed. The “global war on terror,” for example, conditions religious/secular boundaries in local contexts, and vice versa. Western policy-makers assert that the rise of radical Islam necessitated the global war on terror (GWOT); critics assert that the war on terror exacerbated the rise of radical Islam. Meanwhile, mosques remain important arenas for the articulation of ethics and the provision of social welfare in ways that do not necessarily fit the categories of either “radical” or “moderate.” As a counterpoint, GWOT practices shape the discourses of Muslim humanitarian NGO activists who seek validation and funding from Western donors. Liberal market economic practices also condition how religious actors conceptualize their work as well as which issues they prioritize. Religious as well as secular NGOs refer to their objectives through using a globalized “NGO-speak.” Moreover, discourses of economic efficiency pushed by donor communities in health-related humanitarian fields must be taken into account to understand the hierarchy of issues that religious NGOs seek to address. Finally, the religious/secular binary is problematic in dealing with the varieties of syncretism produced by the intersection of “traditional” and “world” religions. Weberian predictions that traditions based on “magic” would give way to “rationalized” world religions have not come to pass. Instead, technology and science intersect with human rights and tradition to create enduring and dynamic relationships between local and world religions. These relationships continue to highlight the unstable nature of distinctions among religious traditions, with implications for the religious/secular binary on issues such as malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Knowledge and Truth in Religious Education

Abstract: It is reasonable to expect, with regard to any traditional academic subject, that it should be capable of being made good sense of as a rational form of knowledge or enquiry focused upon the discernment of truths of one sort or another concerning the world or human affairs. One curriculum area which has generally been held to be problematic in this respect, for a mixture of epistemological, social, ethical and pedagogical reasons, is that of religious education. In the first place, then, this paper is concerned to expose some of the confusions which have been allowed to obscure the nature of religious enquiry as a viable rational enterprise, Second, however, the paper also attempts to develop a coherent und workable account of the nature and operations of knowledge and truth in religious enquiry.

Rethinking religious and civic education: Hybridity, Othering, and the cultivation of Muslim-American students' identities

Abstract: Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education 2014.%%%%This dissertation is based on two multiple case studies through which I examined the intersection of identity, religion, citizenship and agency. The first chapter of the dissertation explains the theoretical framework and why I rely on postcolonial theory and Foucault's theory of power/knowledge in order to interrogate the cultivation of Muslim students' religious and civic identities. The same chapter includes the methodological part of my dissertation. The second chapter clarifies, through in-depth interviews with four Muslim social studies teachers, the dilemmas they faced in educating their students to become good Muslims and good citizens in the U.S. Teachers reported that the growing Islamophobia in the U.S., after September 11, 2001, has increased the tension between Muslim students' religious, national, and transnational belonging. This is true because Muslim-American voices and narratives were not included in the American and World history curriculum, and because of the misrepresentation of Islam in the media and the larger society. Teachers reported that they have the double responsibility to educate their students for good citizenship so that they can defend and explain their Islamic identity. Here I found two types of religious education. The first was dogmatic education which promoted the superiority of Islamic morals and ignored other system of knowing or behaving (moral absolutism). The second (moral pluralism) encouraged students to recognize other systems of morality and to think how the Islamic ethics and moral teachings may contribute to the well-being of all citizens. The same chapter shows the love-hate relationship that Muslim students developed towards their country because of the U.S. foreign policies towards Islamic countries and how teachers dealt with this dilemma. The third chapter shows, relying on Foucault and Bhabha's theories, the struggles that Muslim students faced in their transition from Islamic to public schools in one city in the U.S. This study explored four Muslim teenagers about their transition from one Islamic to different public schools. The study aimed to explore how these students negotiated their identities, how they faced processes of Othering and Islamophobia in public schools, and how they developed their hybrid identities. Five findings were revealed in this chapter. First, Muslim students reported that they did not get a quality education in the Islamic school and this kept them far behind their peers in public schools. That is, they felt they needed to reconcile their religious identity (Islamic and Arabic studies) and their aspirations to get good jobs in the future. Second, there is a solid evidence to show how Muslims students used the Arabic language and their bodies in order to fit within the culture of public school and the technologies of the self they use for this purpose. Third, there was a tension between students' American identity and their parents'…

Islamic religious education in the Netherlands

Abstract: In Dutch primary schools, students choose from among several options for their religious education. In addition to the compulsory “spiritual movements” course, students can either study Islamic religious education (offered in 7 percent of public schools) or Christian religious education. The public and political debates surrounding the 41 Islamic primary schools has shifted over time. Whereas earlier on the debate focused around the merits of, or prejudices against these types of schools, more recent debates have looked at how these schools may impact the integration of Islam students into Dutch society. Most recently, management and quality issues plaguing these schools has been the focus of debate.