Critical Perspective on Religion and Education

Recent work, however, in resacralization and postsecularism suggests a different route. This series seeks to engage questions that have largely been ignored in the field of educational research. As such it takes the stance that public education is always and already religious education not only because of the historical remnants that persist in and around the educational project or because education is inherently a missionary endeavor, but also in the bodies and minds that enter schools on a daily basis, carrying with them strains of religious sentiment and experience that can’t help but shape a schooled life. The same applies to many of school’s procedures and vocabulary. The series is interested in studies that take seriously the ways in which religion shapes the educational experience and is equally concerned with thinking back through certain religious languages, discourses and practices that might make new kinds of critiques of the educational project differently possible. As such the series is, rhizomatically we might suggest, rooted in a number of social scientific fields including, but not limited to: education, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, political science. We think, though, and this is unique, that the work of the series ought also be extended into the humanities to take into account issues and draw from traditions, methodologies, epistemologies, axiologies within, for instance, history, theology, and philosophy. The question, then, isn’t if religion is present in and relevant to education but how its relevance can be better understood, reworked, potentially challenged or fruitfully reinforced.