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Context, Competence and Cultural Diversity: Religious education in a European setting

This important collection of papers is the product of a network of religious educators from England, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Wales. The network was established five years ago as a forum for mutual co-operation and reflection on the changing role of religious education in Europe. The papers presented here are the fruits of a conference held near Frankfurt/Main in 1999 under the academic tutelage of Hans-Gunter Heimbrock. The aim of the conference was programmatic: to respond to the challenge of cultural and religious pluralism by exploring contextual and lifeworld approaches to religious education as a means of reforming the subject in Europe. Hence, despite the inevitable diversity of perspectives on offer, it is possible to identify the presence of a unified and coherent vision across the vast majority of contributions. Their vision embraces two core concerns: religious contextuality and religious competence. The appropriate response to the challenge of pluralism is envisaged as a shift from traditional approaches to religious education grounded in the transmission of knowledge, to a more deliberately productive pedagogy designed to transform cultural and religious identity. This requires a ‘contextual religious education’, one that starts from the immediate cultural situation of the pupil and focuses on her/his negotiation of identity at local level. Such a Balkanization of religious education seeks to avoid the reified abstractions of academic attempts to identify the ‘essence’ of religion in general, and of specific religious traditions in particular, thereby effectively bypassing ‘the problems of the long standing myths about mono-cultural and monoreligious homogeneity’ (p. 13). Such mythical abstractions are taken to be both intellectually dubious and existentially irrelevant. ‘A contextual approach to RE