The Synod of Catholic Bishop's 1971 document, "Justice in the World," articulates boldly that "action on behalf of justice is a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel." Fifty years old, it is timely to assess this document today especially as religious educators address the many forms of inequality in the world.…

An expansive understanding of ancestors is integral to the opening of imaginative spaces for religious education--particularly in university and adult faith formation settings--to grapple deeply with contexts of precarity and the hopelessness such contexts breed. More specifically, this essay considers how hauntings by one's past selves…

This article explores how religious education can access and embrace children with refugee/internally displaced people (IDP) backgrounds to address the issues associated with feelings of loss safely and to contribute to a socially just framework. This article makes practical recommendations for religious educators to respond better to the…

Critically reflecting on a "pedagogy of tenderness", this essay delineates how to build a liberative community of learning in the undergraduate classroom of sexual ethics. The learning community aims to help students understand religion's complex roles in shaping sexual ethics in society, challenge heteropatriarchal sexual ethics through…

African American Sunday school teachers in the early twentieth century were motivated by an ethic of care that was spiritual, historical, and political. This essay reconstructs the image of missionary educator as previously defined or experienced by missionary educators in white religiosity by utilizing the image of othermother presented in the…

The Underground Railroad is the first racially integrated civil/human rights movement in the United States. The basic concepts of "escape" and "travel" that undergird the movement offer a way of envisioning the teaching/learning exchange as leaving behind unhealthy ideologies, and as journeying with students from one place of…

Historically, Blacks have out of necessity prioritized survival in educating their younger generations for existence in the racially hostile and divided context of the U.S. This education and religious education has occurred formally and informally in homes, schools, community organizations, and in congregations. This paper examines three aspects…

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…

Clergy often begin their ministerial careers unprepared to handle issues of professional power, sexuality and intimacy, and interpersonal boundaries. In response, denominational bodies and theological schools are seeking together ways to enhance the teaching of "professional sexual ethics"--referring to the integration of professional ethics,…

Religious education takes place within a postmodern culturalintellectual milieu exemplified in part by the work of Michel Foucault, which disrupts common modern concepts of knowledge and power. For Foucault, power is not only repressive but also productive, insofar as every system of knowledge depends on social arrangements of power for the…