Religious Education publishes scholarship about religious education. This may sound like a truism. Religious education is the ostensibly obvious subject matter for something called Religious Education. The journal’s name appears axiomatic.
What religious education is, however, is anything but self-evident. The field is headachingly diverse. As an international field, the contexts for delivering religious education span widely. As a multireligious field, the foundations for belief and practice differ convictionally. As an interdisciplinary field, subspecialized methodologies bringing together the pedagogical and the spiritual proliferate rapidly. There is no canon.
The multiformity of religious education is evident when compared with, say, the field of biblical studies. While the study of Jonah from a South Pacific Island perspective yields different insights on the reluctant prophet than the study of the same from a Georgian or Jewish perspective, the whale is still a whale. Even though said whale may be either fable or fish, at least scripture scholars are working from the same scroll. Religious education scholars cannot assume they are talking about the same things: a sanctuary is not a school is not a synagogue is not a seminary. To wit, a Methodist “seminary” is sociologically and pedagogically quite different than a Latter-Day Saint “seminary.” Some madrasas are also called “seminaries,” but are still yet another kind of institution.
The six articles that make up Issue 116.4 illustrate this multiformity. Their contents are varied: aesthetics (Holm), trauma (Tran), prayer (Kohn), dialogue (Pope), fragility (Ayres), identity (de Bruin-Wassinkmaat et al.). Their forms are varied: essay (Ayres), case study (Pope), hermeneutics (Holm), meditation (Tran), interview (de Bruin-Wassinkmaat et al.; Kohn). Their contexts are varied: strict Reformed education in the Netherlands (de Bruin-Wassinkmaat et al.), interfaith dialogues in the southeastern United States (Pope), Augustinian thought (Holm), religious high school for boys in Israel (Kohn), liberatory practice (Tran), a pandemic (Ayres).
The field is diverse. Is it disjointed?
The possibility that religious education can be a coherent discipline is made possible, in part, by a journal like this. The name Religious Education represents not so much an axiom as an ongoing project. This journal is produced by authors, editors, reviewers, and readers. By you. The submissions we vet, the manuscripts we peer review, the articles and book reviews we publish, and the research we cite all contribute to a coordinated attempt to bring coherence to our field. There is no canon, but there is a journal.
Religious Education’s editorial process thus involves more than assessing individual articles. We often ask authors to explain how their work engages with and contributes to other research in religious education. Just because a manuscript discusses the topics “religion” and “education” does not necessarily make it a work on “religious education.” Religion and education are themselves subject to varied and contested interpretations. Therefore, Religious Education’s editors press our colleagues to do more than speak about religion and education as separate entities, as hard nouns. We encourage writers to name how the adjectival qualities of religion and education—the educational dimension of religion and/or the religious dimension of education—are expressed in their research. This is illustrated in Henrik Holm’s lovely phrase, “[A]n educational path towards God.” To inquire into the educational dimension of religion and the religious dimension of education is to understand both education and religion as teleological human practices with potential for transcendence. 1 + 1 equals a solid 2 but R + E generates permutations.
University of Queensland
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