In and out of focus: RE horizons

Abstract

I understand that long-term prisoners, when they eventually leave prison, almost always have problems with their eyesight. Without any distant horizons to look at, most newly-released longterm prisoners lose their long-sight altogether. This is similar to the experience of some academic researchers. We can focus for so long on our own narrow topic, a field or policy context or educational practice, that when we finally raise our heads and look beyond this to the wider horizons of what is happening elsewhere, we cannot focus on anything at a distance. One of the many joys of editing a journal, and, I hope, reading a journal, is being forced to keep looking at what is happening in different educational, policy, and practice settings around the world. There are some journals that achieve a narrow focus, and that is impressive and most helpful in its own way. But it was never going to happen with the BJRE. The BJRE is a long-established journal. Those unfamiliar with RE research might think that more than eight decades of research on RE would clarify matters, so that, over time, researchers could focus more and more on a narrow range of important topics. However, the world keeps turning, and just about every issue of the journal since the first one in 1934 (under the title Religion in Education) has reported that ‘things are changing in RE’. We focus on one issue, and another pops up; we focus on one policy context, and another emerges as significant. So I think there is little chance of us losing our long-sightedness, however frustrating it can be to keep refocusing – near, far, near, and far again – constantly observing a distant horizon whilst being aware of what is in front of our faces. The current issue illustrates well the need to go in and out of focus at different distances. We start with two articles that focus on secularity in very different ways. Good research on French RE has been limited not only by the constitutional restrictions on religion in public institutions, but almost as much by the belief that there is no education about religion happening in French schools. Religions and religious culture are taught in various ways, both in state schools and in private schools. However, as Carol Ferrara points out, there is a lack of equity between, especially, Christian and Muslim culture, with the latter being restricted in various ways. This ethnographic research is good at reminding us that whatever the broader policy, the practice within schools may follow different patterns. A broader perspective on secularity is provided by Tünde Puskás and Anita Andersson in their article on ‘secular Advent’ as a way of promoting a ‘banal national religion’ as part of a ‘banal Swedishness’. I can’t help being worried by banality in education, and this article explains why. In contrast to (nominally) secularist approaches to RE, a number of countries have had long traditions of what is loosely called ‘confessionalist’ RE. There are three articles here that demonstrate how RE in such countries has itself ‘raised its head’ in looking at wider horizons, perhaps moving away from confessionalism in the light of changes around the world. Katarzyna Wrońska writes of solitude and selflessness as central to liberal and religious education in Poland. Based on long traditions of European philosophy and Christian humanism, she engages with current policy in Poland, and by implication, RE across Europe, with a challenge to build on liberal traditions that are potentially threatened by illiberal politics that have found footholds across the continent and across the world. Within Turkey, Muhammet Fatih Genç and A H M Ershad Uddin argue for something like a liberal approach to RE that is based, not necessarily on long historical conditions, but on the current ‘fact’ of globalisation and religious plurality. Defending cultural pluralism, whilst leaving religious-metaphysical pluralism to one side, is a neat solution to the problems of focusing on a single religion in a determinedly (religiously) plural world. Perhaps that is not such a long way from the original liberal philosophies that grew up in 17 century Europe, referenced by Wrońska. BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 2023, VOL. 45, NO. 2, 83–85 https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2023.2170119