Stepping into sacred texts: how the Jesuits taught me to read the Bible

This chapter weaves together several elements around the question of how public education should teach students about sacred texts. The first element is education research since 2000, which raises critical questions about an undue emphasis on the use of proof texts in exams. This emphasis distorts the impression given of the role of sacred texts in religion. The second element which illustrates the degree of variance is a recounted experience of using Ignatian spiritual exercises with secondary age students. This involved deep learning and encounter with a sacred narrative, and contrasts radically with the utilisation of texts in external exams. Methods of experiential religious education (hereafter RE) which had come to focus in the 1990s had sought to respiritualise the study of sacred texts in British RE, and there were clearly attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to develop a different educative approach in schools. These observations about curriculum development in RE constitute a kind of classroom participatory turn similar to that observed in university studies of religion and spirituality. This turn challenges norms in academic learning and offers important insights into the developments in school studies. Questions to do with the nature of the study of religion and sacred texts and the kind of learning that is privileged seem pertinent across the university/school boundaries.

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