Reimagining the Landscape of Religious Education

Book excerpt: This book brings together new thinking and research on religious education’s complex and evolving role in the multicultural, diverse postmodern era. It facilitates new realism and understanding of the current situation from empirical and reflective accounts relating to a variety of countries and political contexts, as well as providing innovative methodological approaches to the study of education and religion. In different contexts around the world, at different levels of education, and from different theoretical lenses, religious education occupies a contested space. The ongoing, changing nature of the world due to increasing secularization, rapid technological change, mass immigration, globalization processes, conflict and challenging security issues, from inter to intra state levels, and with shifting geopolitical power balances, generates the need to reconceptualize where religious education is positioned. It claims that religious education on its own can be an agent of moral, social and spiritual transformation are disputed. There is significant controversy about whether special religious education, that is in-faith education, still has a role within the post-modern world.