In Memoriam: Prof. Dr. John M. Hull (April 22, 1935–July 28, 2015)

With great sadness we learned that Professor John Hull passed away on July 28, 2015. The global religious education community has lost an important and profound academic companion and leader and a beloved, respected, and very sharp and humorous person. We will miss a scholar who has contributed exceptionally in the field of religious education, especially through his continuous efforts in trying to realize interreligious education in public schools, and pedagogically emphasizing dialogue and encounter between religions and worldviews in schools.

The quality of his work was already broadly noticed and was highly appreciated since the early 1990s (cf. Bates, Durka and Schweitzer 2006; Miedema 2009). In 1991 John Hull was granted the prestigious William Rainey Harper Award from the international Religious Education Association for his work in the field of religious education. In 1995 he received in Frankfurt an honorary doctorate in theology from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University for his achievements in the field of practical theology. In 2005 he received an honorary doctorate in education from the Faculty of Psychology and Education of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for his contributions to interreligious education. In 1980 John Hull became fully blind. He had written extensively about his blindness, but he had always continued his work and contributions at the highest level of achievement, both nationally and internationally.

John Hull was heavily inspired by Ninian Smart, with his plea for religious education as an encounter of religions. Smart called for the abandonment of faith nurturing aims for religious education in state schools and its replacement by what he called a “sensitive induction into religious studies, not with the aim of evangelizing but with the aim of creating certain capacities to understand and think about religion.” While Smart was considered by many teachers as an unrealistic academic, it was Hull—a trained teacher, a religious educationalist, a man with a strong Christian conviction, and a prominent member of the Christian Education Movement, a movement focusing on education in schools from the Christian tradition—who concretized Smart's vision pedagogically together with co-workers, for example in The Gift to the Child project.

He became successful in changing religious education in theory and practice in the direction of interreligious education and learning. It was his view that it is crucial that religious education be part and parcel of every public school's curriculum and that this education not only aim at knowledge about religions but also have a moral as well as spiritual dimension. However, religious education should not focus on discipleship, but on the student's own religious autonomy and personhood formation. So, the focus in his work has always been on the individual student's religious development with the help of specific religious issues, that is its objects, rituals, and the practices that fulfill an important role within a particular religious community. These issues should present and represent aspects of the sacred beauty of religious life.

The context of increasing multireligiosity he himself had experienced since the sixties in the United Kingdom and especially in Birmingham has had a tremendous influence on his conceptualization of religious education. However, the enormous impact of his work is not restricted to the United Kingdom, and his impact was also due to his leading role as editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Religious Education for many years, and his continuing charismatic chairmanship of the International Seminar on Religious Education and Values, (ISREV). The great importance of his contributions has been recognized worldwide, and even much stronger after “9/11.” His views on religious education are still highly relevant today. Requiescat in pace.

Prof Em. Dr. Siebren Miedema

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands