E-raamat: On Holy Ground: The Theory and Practice of Religious Education: original: 9780415857871 [Taylor & Francis e-raamat]

Gearon (religious education, U. of Oxford, England) explores the epistemological grounds of religious education once religious education has been separated from religious life (that is, in the practices of non-denominational teaching about religion). After identifying the main forms of knowledge that have come to ground modern religious education, he devotes separate chapters to examining each of their varying approaches of towards the explication of religion. These forms of knowledge are: philosophy, the natural sciences, the social sciences, psychology, phenomenology, politics, and aesthetics. He concludes with an argument that asserts that by separating the holy from the idea of the holy, these epistemological approaches to religious education necessarily take a moral stance that seeks separation of the learned from the holy life. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Religion has had notable and renewed prominence in contemporary public and political life. Religious questions have also been freshly examined in philosophy and theology, the natural sciences, the social sciences, psychology, phenomenology, politics and the arts. These fields reflect complex, multi-disciplinary understandings of religion, some hostile, some accommodating. For religious education this has all contributed to its own international renaissance. Religious education, in ensuring it is contemporary, shares with these fields the same criticality, the same distance between the study of religion and the religious life.

Yet what are the grounds of this modern religious education? Through a systematic historical and contemporary cross-disciplinary analysis, answering this question is the ambitious task of the book.

Chapters include:

• philosophy, theology and religious education
• the natural sciences and religious education
• the social sciences and religious education
• psychology, spirituality and religious education
• phenomenology and religious education
• the politics of religious education
• the aesthetics of religious education.

The central problem of all modern religious education remains this: what are the grounds of religious education when religious education is no longer grounded in the religious life, in the life of the holy? Although this primarily appears to be an epistemological problem, it soon becomes a moral and existential one. The book will be of key interest to teachers, theorists and researchers working in religious education.