Contextual religious education and the interpretive approach

Abstract

This article responds to Andrew Wright's critique of my views on the representation of religions. Using various literary devices – associating my work closely with that of others whose views are in some ways different from my own, referring very selectively to published texts and exaggerating, and sometimes misrepresenting, what I actually say – Wright presents my work as dualistic, nominalist and as not genuinely hermeneutical. Wright contrasts what he sees as my extreme idea of religions as ‘constructions’ with his own view of them as ‘social facts’. My reply illustrates and responds to Wright's account of my work, clarifies my own position and raises questions about Wright's views, especially in relation to those of Gavin Flood, whom he cites with favour. My conclusion includes the suggestion that, although our epistemological positions are different in some ways, they spawn pedagogies utilising some common principles and values.

Keywords:

• construction
• contextual approach
• groups
• interpretive approach
• religion
• religions
• representation
• social fact
• tradition

Notes

1. There is no space available to summarise the interpretive approach to religious education. Accounts of the approach can be read, for example, in Jackson (1997), Jackson (2004b, Chapter 6) and Jackson (2006).

2. The first is from a paper by the Norwegian researcher Heid Leganger‐Krogstad, the second from the German scholar Heinz Streib, writers with different positions whose work deserves specific attention.

3. The fact that Western influences on some portrayals of ‘Hinduism’ can be exposed does not preclude attempts at more nuanced general accounts of Hindu tradition that try to get behind inter‐textually transmitted assumptions and structures (see Jackson 1996 for a discussion of the literature on Western influences on the formation of the concept of ‘Hinduism’).

4. Moreover, the hermeneutical process of comparing examples with the general description outlined above does provide criteria for discussing the relationship of particular examples to the wider tradition (see e.g. Arweck, Nesbitt, and Jackson 2005).

5. The use of Western and often Christian concepts when discussing other traditions was a feature of some writing in the phenomenology of religion (Jackson 1997, 14–29).

6. In projecting other meanings of social construction on to my work, Wright is highly selective in his citations. For example, he does not refer to the following passage which refers specifically to the stance on ‘social construction’ taken within the research project ‘Ethnography and Religious Education’ and its associated curriculum project ‘The Warwick RE Project’:

Does our approach, with its underlying critique of the ways ‘religions’ have been represented in much Western literature, imply a view that knowledge is socially constructed, with ‘truth’ being relative to each constructed way of life? It is certainly the case that our project assumes that at least some aspects of knowledge are ‘socially constructed’ … This is different from asserting that all knowledge is socially constructed and that the notion of ‘ultimate truth’ has no meaning. (Jackson 1997, 125)