Pedagogical Projects: Teaching Liberal Religion After 9/11

2018

Education Sciences

In this article, I focus on the increasing interest taken by European political and educational policy makers in inter-worldview education. My article has two parts. The first part consists of a document analysis of pivotal European publications on this and related issues. In the second and more critical part of this article, I make explicit my concerns about these European pleas for inter-worldview education. The main criticism that I present below is that the European policy on inter-worldview dialogue views the problem of intolerance too much as an individual problem that can and must be dealt with pedagogically, without recognizing that intolerance is just as much a structural socio-political problem. Important European policy documents, to be examined in the first part of this article, do not discuss how the way our societies are structured results in a sustenance of inequalities and in the marginalization of certain groups of people. At no point does these documents link inter-worldview education to the need "to examine the ideologies and structures of society critically," as a consequence the plea for dialogue loses some of its critical and transforming potential.

Section: Towards a Call For Strong Tolerancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Political Liberalism and The Distinction Between Good And Bamentioning

confidence: 99%

Inter-Worldview Education and the Re-Production of Good Religion

2018

Education Sciences

Interreligious Hermeneutics, Prejudice, and the Problem of Testimonial Injustice

2019

Religious Education

As interreligious educators we challenge our students to engage in hermeneutical self-reflection. In this article, I turn the tables, and engage in an exercise of reflective practice: I look back on my own pedagogy, consider my own religiously diverse classroom, and ask in what way the theoretical framework from which I approach interreligious learning has facilitated and hindered the learning process of my students. I especially inquire into chances and limits of the hermeneutical approach of interreligious learning, an approach with which I identify. I will first elaborate on the importance of the socalled hermeneutical approach to interreligious learning and dwell on my own appropriation of this approach. Here the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and his hermeneutical anthropology will occupy center stage. Next, and triggered by my own experiences as an interfaith educator, I will argue that the hermeneutical approach to interreligious learning has a tendency to level relations between self and other and falls short when it comes to reckoning with unequal power relations. I will illustrate this shortcoming on the basis of a concrete case of testimonial injustice that has occurred in my classroom.

Interreligious Learning, Ricoeur, and the Problem of Testimonial and Hermeneutical Injustice

Journal of Nationalism, Memory &Amp; Language Politics

2019

Ricoeur’s philosophy of religion as well as his suggestion that we may consider interreligious dialogue as a specific form of linguistic hospitality has inspired many to think through the challenges of interfaith learning in a post-secular age. I am one of those scholars who have found Ricoeur a particularly helpful conversation partner as I sought to create a nonviolent and transformative space of encounter in my interreligious classroom. In this article, I elaborate on how my lived experiences as an interreligious educator have made me wonder if Ricoeur’s philosophy of religion and his plea for interreligious hospitality are not actually limiting the critical potential of interreligious education. Ricoeur’s interreligious hermeneutics strongly resonates with a modern (Protestant) understanding of religion and its implicit, normative distinction between good (mature) and bad (immature) religiosity, which to this day belongs to the sociopolitical imagination of the majority in most Western European countries (this is certainly true for the Netherlands). It has been my pedagogical experience that this distinction between good and bad religion contributes to and reinforces testimonial and hermeneutical injustice in my classroom, which results in the marginalization of some of my students, especially those whose religious practice does not fit the understanding of what religion ought to be.