This volume provides a detailed evaluation of a unique education program implemented in secondary schools in Georgia to enhance teachers’ religious literacy and their ability to promote this in schools and classrooms. The text demonstrates that religious literacy can be proactively taught to students, whilst also highlighting key considerations and tensions around religious liberty in the American South. Spanning rural, urban, and suburban Georgia, the text presents an original approach to the growing field of religious literacy by foregrounding community voices and perspectives. Using rich empirical data and qualitative interviews with religious and political leaders, scholars, teachers, parents, and students, the book evaluates the challenges, efficacy, and benefits of the program in view of rising political polarization. In doing so, the text tackles historical and contemporary issues around race and religion, and considers tensions between religious and nonreligious groups in the US. Ultimately, the book presents a significant contribution to the dialogue around fostering religious literacy in schools. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in religious education, teacher education, and religious literacy more broadly. Those interested in the sociology of education, as well as diversity and religion in America, will also benefit from this volume.

Teaching Cross-Culturally is a challenging consideration of what it means to be a Christian educator in a culture other than your own. Chapters include discussions about how to uncover cultural biases, how to address intelligence and learning styles, and teaching for biblical transformation. Teaching Cross-Culturally is ideal for the western-trained educator or missionary who plans to work in a non-western setting, as well as for those who teach in an increasingly multicultural North America.

This pioneering handbook proposes an approach to pluralism that is relational, principled, and non-relativistic, going beyond banal calls for mere "tolerance." The growing religious diversity within societies around the world presents both challenges and opportunities. A degree of competition between deeply held religious/worldview perspectives is natural and inevitable, yet at the same time the world urgently needs engagement and partnership across lines of difference. None of the world’s most pressing problems can be solved by any single actor, and as such it is not a question of if but when you partner with an individual or institution that does not think, act, or believe as you do. The authors argue that religious literacy—defined as a dynamic combination of competencies and skills, continuously refined through real-world cross-cultural engagement—is vital to building societies and states of neighborly solidarity and civic fairness. Through examination, reflection, and case studies across multiple faith traditions and professional fields, this handbook equips scholars and students, as well as policymakers and practitioners, to assess, analyze, and act collaboratively in a world of deep diversity. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

In Overcoming Religious Illiteracy, Harvard professor and Phillips Academy teacher Diane L. Moore argues that though the United States is one of the most religiously diverse nations in the world, the vast majority of citizens are woefully ignorant about religion itself and the basic tenets of the world's major religious traditions. The consequences of this religious illiteracy are profound and include fueling the culture wars, curtailing historical understanding and promoting religious and racial bigotry. In this volume, Moore combines theory with practice to articulate how to incorporate the study of religion into the schools in ways that will invigorate classrooms and enhance democratic discourse in the public sphere.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Schools and Religion provides the first truly global scan of contemporary issues and debates around the world regarding the relationship(s) between the state, schools and religion. Organized around specific contested issues - from whether or not mindfulness should be practised in schools, to appropriate and inappropriate religious attire in schools, to long-term battles about evolution, sexuality, and race, to public funding - Fraser-Pearce and Fraser carefully curate chapters by leading experts exploring these matters and others in a diverse range of national settings. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Schools and Religion offers a refreshingly new international perspective.

This text explores the phenomenon of religious bullying as it manifests in two North American contexts and theorizes religious literacy as a viable school-based intervention to promote understanding of religious and non-religious difference. Using substantive, qualitative data from schools and communities in California and Quebec, Teaching Religious Literacy to Combat Religious Bullying examines the impact of mandatory religious literacy courses delivered in secondary schools and identifies curricula, teacher attitudes, training, and administrative support as key determinants of course impact. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner's social-ecological framework, the text then illustrates how the environmental factors both in and outside of the school considerably influence teacher and student attitudes to religious and non-religious traditions. Practical recommendations are made to combat overarching societal trends and religious discrimination within the classroom, and context is cited as key to an effective discussion on religious literacy more broadly. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in religious literacy, religious education, the sociology of education, and those looking at the field of bullying and truancy more widely. Those interested in intersectionality, marginalized communities, secularism, and educational policy will also benefit from the volume.

This timely book offers a critically important contribution to debates around the meeting place of religious and secular worldviews in education. Edited by five leading figures in the field, and drawing on expert international scholarship and research, the book provides cutting-edge analysis that bridges the religious and secular in global educational contexts. Considering the role of the United Nations, UNESCO, OECD and PISA in varied international contexts, the book draws on critical analysis of primary empirical research and secondary critique to offer a coherent blend of theoretically complex yet practical analysis of policy implementation. Throughout this accessible and logically structured volume, the authors assert that the meeting place of religious and secular worldviews is one of the most important and pressing issues for religion in education. As a field-defining work of research into education, religion and worldviews, the book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of religious education, religious studies, philosophy of education and international education.