Volume 66, Issue 3

The future development of church membership or religious indifference is currently unpredictable. What’s more, the author argues that this perspective is of no relevance to Religious Education with nondenominational students. Instead, he advocates a “transconfessional” approach to Religious Education, in which the students’ confession or formal membership of a church doesn’t count. Thus, he rather looks at how RE can help pupils to consciously choose or decline a religious lifestyle. In this context, the author also points out that all thought on how to work with nondenominationals in RE classes can resort to the past years’ rich experience with ecumenical and interreligious learning.

Non-denominationalism appears as a complex and ambiguous phenomenon. The article offers criteria and develops typological structures in order to characterize the construction of membership and renouncing membership in different world religions (section 1) and to describe religious educational approaches to non-denominationals in different European countries (section 2). Exemplifying this survey there are some details given on dealing with pupils without religious commitment in England and modern Israel (section 3). Summarizing these observations the author marks one major challenge for RE, that is both to respect non-denominationalism and to drag non-denominationals and denominationals into struggling for a suitable interpretation of reality

The article reports empirical findings about religious attitudes and values of non-denominational adolescents in Germany. The results show that these adolescents prefer categories of the natural sciences to describe their experiences of self and world. Non-personal images of God and an open semantic of spirituality are preferred over more conventional religious forms. Furthermore, they prefer more than other adolescents values of achievement, hedonism, stimulation and self-determination. Based on these results conclusions for religious education are drawn.

With the increase of non-denominational pupils, the insight into how knowledge is conditioned by the social and local context gains significance for religious education. The following article examines the interaction of teaching/taught players within the classroom setting of religious education. The fundamental didactic responsibility is to sensitize pupils for religious interpretations and -lifestyle and to mark its plausibility beside a natural-scientific worldview which is common sense. According to the article this may be reached by creating possibilities and settings within the lessons allowing the pupils to be in contact with authentic representatives and by addressing essential issues concerning their life. Finally, the author expounds the prospects of the empowerment-concept within classroom settings and formulates a standard of religious education saying religious education has to enable the development of personality in its social context.

Identifying appropriate learning tasks can be challenging for religious education teachers in a religiously mixed context: Does the task provide the opportunity for denominational and non-denominational learners to examine religious beliefs from different perspectives? Will the task engage the learners’ interest? Does the task relate to real world activities? Discussing these questions, the article offers criteria for designing appropriate learning tasks.

The article describes the fundamental hermeutic and didactical conditions - which determine Religious Education in the context of heterogeneous religious attitudes and non-denominationalism. It emphasizes the importance of religious literacy, especially the understanding of the characteristic modes of religious communication in symbols and methaphors. In critical discussion of the question, whether religious language can be translated into secular terms or can be learned as a foreign language, it argues for special forms of transformation and interpretation.

The challenge to move between one’s own and not one’s own, between familiar and the other - interpersonal and intrapersonal - arises not only within the discussion about confessionalism and “konfessionelle Ungebundenheit“ (confessional freedom). It also arises in several contexts, for example, in the encounter with age, disease, and death. This essay is concerned with the awareness of exemplary configurations. This is shown under a „blickartistical“ perspective using the example of the religious educational project „FaltenRiss-Alter neu sehen“. „Blick- Art-ist-Religion-als-Kunst“ is a religious didactical approach which is led by the idea of opening up strange perspectives and entwining worlds. „Blickartistik“ motivates us to participate in the religious communication in our society through the awareness and exploration of one’s own inconsistency as well as one’s diversity of experience. Thus, dealing with it can be seen as a chance to develop religious communication skills for those who want to impart and inseminate (the Christian) Religion.

Protestant religious education is aimed primarily at protestant pupils, but is also open to non-denominational children. New challenges arise, if, as in some instances in eastern Germany, the majority of pupils in religious education are non-denominational - a situation, in which some traditional contents of protestant religious education may cause severe misunderstandings. The article argues, therefore, that protestant religious education should be based not only on a denominational teacher and curriculum, but should also focus on the practice of religion in a specific denominational style. Religious education under these circumstances is sometimes urged to leave the classroom for studying the practice of Christian belief and encountering the plurality of Protestantism.