The spirit of religious education

ABSTRACT

As an educational researcher I began researching spirituality because, in the UK, ‘spiritual development’ is a statutory requirement for all state schools, and I wanted to explore whether this was appropriate and what it might therefore mean. This led to my researching relational spirituality (as also described by David Hay), both in the UK and Hong Kong, and the idea of the ‘spirit of the school’ emerged. This was subsequently applied to research on assessment, boys’ schools, and computing. In this article, it is applied it to religious education. An approach to researching the spirit of religious education is presented, along with an invitation to join such a research project.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious education
• dualism
• relational
• dualism
• David Hay
• John Macmurray
• Martin Buber

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Julian Stern ([email protected]) is Professor of Education and Religion at York St John University. He was a school teacher for fourteen years, and has worked in universities for twenty-six years. He is widely published, with fifteen books (plus five second or third editions), chapters in eighteen other books, and well over thirty peer-reviewed articles, on education, spirituality, religion, loneliness and solitude, and research methods.