Navigating Religious Boundaries at School: From Legitimate to Specious Religious Questions (original) (raw)
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Secularization and diversity are two social features that characterize the contemporary world. The rhetoric of the public debate in a number of countries has become increasingly polarized and characterized by a “we” and “them” thinking that relates a national “we” to a specific religion. This occurs in part as a reaction to the changes in national monocultural paradigms as most communities today are characterized by pluralism regarding lifestyles, religion, language and geographical background. Thus, secularization processes are ongoing while many countries, not least Sweden, are becoming increasingly pluralistic and multi-religious. The school and classrooms are a mirror of the communities they are a part of. The aim of the article is to explore how secularization and increasing pluralism finds expression and interact in the classroom practice of Religious Education. The analysis is based on ethnographic data from classroom observations of Religious Education in four different Swed...
Journal of Education and Practice, 2015
Every society craves naturally to live in communion and understanding with the persons and the groups found in it. This is also in line with the aphorism that man is a ‘being-with-others’, as against the separatist and segregationist opinion of each person living ‘for-itself’. Whereas the first denotes man as altruistic and outreaching, the latter sees man as selfish and isolated from others around him. To live in communion with others means exercising a high sense of understanding (verstehen) and empathy for his environment. On the contrary, it is entails indifference and apathy. To understand others can be manifested in the effort any government or any society makes to establish institutions of learning which either integrate the citizens or segregate them leading to divisions and separatist tendencies. Religious institutions can be the clearest examples of such integrative tendencies or separatist ideologies. In a pluri-religious and diverse cultural society like Nigeria, it is m...