Mapping the moral assumptions of multi-faith religious education
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Authors
Moulin-Stożek, D
Metcalfe, J
Publication Date
2020-03-16Journal Title
British Journal of Religious Education
ISSN
0141-6200
Type
Article
This Version
AM
Metadata
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Moulin-Stożek, D., & Metcalfe, J. (2020). Mapping the moral assumptions of multi-faith religious education. British Journal of Religious Education https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2018.1556605
Abstract
© 2018, © 2018 Christian Education. When Religious Education (RE) in England and Wales transitioned from Christian confessionalism to a multi-faith approach in the latter half of the twentieth century, the subject’s moral aims were reasserted. In this article, we explore the moral assumptions of this transformation and map some of their connections to other theological and ethical ideas. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of a rhizome, we make two novel contributions to scholarship in this regard. First, through some salient examples we show the connections between the moral aims of multi-faith RE and the assumptions of Kantian moral religion. The second contribution, building on this analysis, identifies three moral justifications of multi-faith RE: universalist (founded on assumptions of moral universals across religions), vicarious (the support of a religious worldview by using other religions’ moral teachings) and instrumentalist (a moral justification based on the supposed extrinsic benefits of studying religions). We then go onto consider how these assumptions may differ from the moral commitments of the religions they appropriate, suggesting they disrupt and recombine theocentric concepts into pedagogic ones.
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2018.1556605
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/298752
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