Contemporary Challenges for Religious and Spiritual Education

Terence Lovat is Professor Emeritus at Newcastle University, Australia, and Honorary Research Fellow at Oxford University, UK. He is a former Dean of Education and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Newcastle University, and is now a full-time research scholar.　His main areas of interest are in religious education, values education, and Islam in schools.Arniika Kuusisto is Adjunct Professor and University Lecturer at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Visiting Associate Professor at University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests include socialization and agency in worldview development, sensitivities in teachers’ pedagogical toolkits, and the negotiations on values and memberships that children and young people go through in multicultural and multi-faith settings.

• Introduction 1. The development and dissemination of Council of Europe policy on education about religions and non-religious convictions 2. The potential impact of the neurosciences on religious and spiritual education: ramifying from the impact on values education 3. Pupils’ views of religious education in a pluralistic educational context 4. What should religious education in Germany be about and how does religiosity fit into this picture? An empirical study of pre-service religious education teachers’ beliefs on the aims of RE 5. Creating metacognitive environments in primary school RE classrooms 6. The core of religious education: Finnish student teachers’ pedagogical aims 7. Altruistic values in children’s spirituality: a study of children’s responses to the terror attacks in Oslo and on Utøya and issues of education 8. The Little Prince – an introduction to spirituality: a moving experience in religious education for primary school children in a secularised world 9. Prayer as a cause of recovery from illness 10. Religious and spiritual education in disability situations in Italy 11. Towards international comparative research on the professionalisation of Religious Education 12. Measuring religious social capital: scale properties of the modified Williams Religious Social Capital Index among Friends of cathedrals

"Contemporary Challenges for Religious and Spiritual Education is a text that academics and researchers would find highly valuable as they seek to understand current trends in religious and spiritual education." - Adam Paape, International Journal of Christianity & Education