Abstract
The author uses the political philosopher, John Gray’s book, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (1995), to mount a critique of modern religious education and its commitment to Enlightenment values and principles. He argues that the liberal theological conviction that the different religions are each spiritually valid is constitutive of modern British religious education. He concludes that current representations of religion in British religious education, conditioned as they are by this conviction and underlying assumption, are limited in their capacity to challenge racism and religious intolerance, chiefly because they are ill-equipped conceptually to develop respect for difference.
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Barnes, L.P. (2010). Enlightenment’s Wake: Religion and Education at the Close of the Modern Age. In: Engebretson, K., de Souza, M., Durka, G., Gearon, L. (eds) International Handbook of Inter-religious Education. International Handbooks of Religion and Education, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9260-2_2
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