Religious Education at Schools in Europe: Parts 4–6—Review

Abstract

These are the final three volumes to complete the ambitious project to map the status quo and the status quaestionis of religious education across Europe. Each volume is devoted to a region, and within each, contributions by different authors present the situation in each country. This triple publication from 2020 presents Eastern Europe (Vol. 4), Southeastern Europe (Vol. 5), and Southern Europe (Vol. 6). Since the volumes appear together and belong to the same project, we have chosen to write this review together, based on Jonathan Doney’s (JD) reading of Volume 4, Inge Andersland’s (IA) reading of Volume 5, and Nils H. Korsvoll’s (NK) reading of Volume 6. In what follows, we address (a) overall aims and impact, (b) key issues and regional variance, and (c) the books’ sections regarding challenges and desiderata are given special attention. We do this by first giving a joint introduction and then offering a dialogical discussion between the three reviewers where our observations are based on the respective volume that we have been assigned. Lastly, we each recommend three chapters from each book that especially interested us. The volumes are part of the Religious Education at Schools in Europe (REL-EDU) project, which was launched at two symposia held in Vienna in 2011–2012. There the assembled scholars drew up a common outline of 13 key issues, addressing the social, political, and legal framing of religious education (RE), content and conceptions of RE, religion and diversity outside RE, and teaching and research in religious didactics. The thirteen key issues provide a common structure across the chapters and all the volumes in the series, facilitating comparison and their use as reference works. The editors regret the delay in publishing these three final volumes—the first three volumes appeared in 2014–2015—but have produced a complete and well-rounded series that will surely be a useful introduction and reference work for RE in Europe.