Editorial: spaces of religious and values education

It is the remit of this journal to publish research relating to religious and values education in contemporary schools and classrooms and within religious institutions. But what of the many ubiquitous but neglected spaces of religious and values education outside of these contexts, in the cultural and public spaces of society, through organisations founded by or allied to religion, or through the media? I offer the following as examples.

Firstly, I recently took a walk down a city street. In only walking 200 metres I encountered a diversity of religious activity: Christian, then Muslim street preachers, a performance of indigenous American music, Buddhist chanting, Scientologist leafleting. How do such displays of faith on the street inform and shape the religious literacy of the thousands passing by and their understanding of what religion is? How would one go about studying the religiously educative qualities of the sacred in our geography?

Secondly, what of the museum as a space of religious and values education? Bruce Sullivan (2015), writing in Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces notes, for instance, how a 2.3 metre tall statue of the Buddha, which dominates an exhibition space at the city of Birmingham, UK’s, Museum and Art Gallery, functions as both a visitor attraction and a focus for an annual religious ceremony. Is not this, and a further contemporary example in the Ashmolean’s Imagining the Divine, educative of religion, yet unattended to by researchers on religious education?

Thirdly, as Sarah Mills has shown in her work on the Jewish Lads Brigade of the 1950s and 60s (Mills 2016), religious and values education happens beyond classrooms, in organisations allied to religion. What might research on the many such groups established by religious communities (and non-religious groups) to foster discipline and a range of moral and ideological commitments tell us about the qualities of religious and values education on offer? How does this learning interact with, reinforce, refine, or conflict with, the formal religious education received in other contexts?

Fourthly, the BBC has announced a greater spend on its Religion and Ethics output (BBC 2017). This is to be applauded. Although it is unclear how output directed at children and young will be affected (BBC 2017: 19), researchers on religious education have hitherto paid scant attention to the effects upon learning of religion on radio, television and in the digital and social media, with a few notable exceptions (Hess 2014). Similarly, how learning in these spaces impacts and interacts with how children are taught to conceive of religion in schools has received scant attention.

We need to broaden our conceptualization of the spaces in which religious education occurs to take into account those other highly influential forms of it elsewhere. In a cultural situation in which people belong less, and often define themselves in opposition to the religious (Lee 2015), it would be fascinating to explore the influence of these other spaces of religious education.

Meanwhile, research reported on in this issue covers a broad scope. Timothy Sutton reflects upon the place of religion in the public sphere, particularly how understandings of traditional religious positions in the university classroom can enrich the discourse in the liberal arts. In two separate articles by Youcef Sai and Joanne O’Flaherty (et al) in turn they write of parents and teachers’ views of Irish Muslim schools, and the influence of teachers on moral education in Irish publish schooling. Pieter Vos’ article concerns the place of moral exemplars in programmes of character education, and precisely what it is that students should learn from significant moral others; while Leslie Francis’ article examines the influence of peers and parents on the attitudes to religion of young churchgoers in Australia. Katharina Welling and Bert Roebben in their article evaluate the effects of a text-based approach to interreligious dialogue, Scriptural Reasoning, amongst teachers in training from different faith and non-religious backgrounds. In the piece following, Kenneth Hemmerechts (et al) reports on research of the relationship between educational expectations and religious background amongst immigrant children. The final article of this issue by Stephen Garrett examines the place of Christian theology in the social imaginary in post-Communist societies. This issue as a whole well represents the breadth, richness and quality of the articles currently being submitted to the journal.

I am delighted to report that from this volume – its 39^th – the Journal of Beliefs and Values is moving to four issues per year. In addition to the journal’s enhanced standing in the citation indices, it is a sign of the health of the journal and the fields it represents that this development should take place.

Stephen Parker

References