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Worldviews of Today
Abstract
Higher learning enhances not only knowledge, awareness and critical thinking but also a sense of meaning, purpose, responsibility,
right action and hope for the future. These are concerns also of religious traditions which founded the great universities.
But the secularization of the academy has marginalized and compartmentalized religious worldviews. This has come with a cost.
Religious illiteracy has increased. Many faculty members, intellectually estranged from religion, feel ill-prepared to engage
students in spiritual matters. Secular worldviews often dominate by default and are uncritically assessed. This chapter looks
at these costs and explores teaching for dialogue and mutual understanding that is inclusive of both religious and secular
perspectives. It puts forward a pedagogical/curricular model that engages students in knowing self and others and introduces
worldview frameworks to assist in identifying, describing and analyzing various worldviews of today – one–s own, those of
others, those that hold sway in the public square.
KeywordsEducation-Religion-Worldview study-Worldview frameworks-Worldview types-Knowing self and others
Worldviews are those larger pictures that inform and in turn form our perceptions of reality. They are visions of life as well as ways of life , are individual and personal in nature, yet bind adherents together communally. Coming to understand a worldview can serve to illuminate particular beliefs and values, and may be helpful in a post-Christian, post-modern or even post-secular era filled with religious, spiritual and secular beliefs of various kinds that hold sway today in the public realm. This article looks at Christianity through a worldview lens using an “ultimate/existential questions” framework (who and what are we; meaning and purpose; responsibilities and obligations; discerning right from wrong; power, force or being greater than humans; and life after this life) to get at the heart of some fundamental Christian beliefs and values.
Turkish religious education's focus on religion from a social science and prescriptive Islamic perspective faces challenges today. This article presents a new model and approach that assists students in exploring their beliefs and values, those of others, and their Islamic heritage from an interdisciplinary worldview perspective.
In this article texts by scholars from South Africa, Sweden and Great Britain are analysed. They contributed as invited speakers to a conference in Sweden in 2009 on changing societies, values, religions and education. Here a South–North dialogue on diversity and the future of education is constructed through the way their conference contributions are presented and analysed. Democracy and gender also appear as crucial themes. Out of the original 12 keynote contributions to the conference a selection is made, meaning that seven of them are focused on. What can be observed is (a) that the contributors from South Africa connect diversity and social justice; (b) that the gender researchers critically discuss the risks of the North imposing its theoretical framework on the South and search for ways out of that and (c) a preoccupation with a renewal of education recognising diversity but also looking for what could come beyond such an emphasis and form a common ground. The article constitutes an example of shared knowledge production where South and North meet. Conditions for that are critically reflected upon methodologically.
The first book of the EC-funded REDCo Project, published prior to a series of empirical research studies published in the same Waxmann series. The book sets the scene for the empirical research to follow.
Published in the series Religious Diversity and Education in Europe, edited by Cok Bakker, Jenny Berglund, Gerdien Bertram-Troost, Hans-Günter Heimbrock, Julia Ipgrave, Robert Jackson, Geir Skeie, Wolfram Weisse
Globalisation and plurality are influencing all areas of education, including religious education. The inter-cultural and multi-religious situation in Europe demands a re-evaluation of the existing educational systems in particular countries as well as new thinking at the broader European level. This well-established peer reviewed book series is committed to the investigation and reflection on the changing role of religion and education in Europe, including the interface between European research, policy and practice and that of countries or regions outside Europe. Contributions will evaluate the situation, reflect on fundamental issues and develop perspectives for better policy making and pedagogy, especially in relation to practice in the classroom.
The publishing policy of the series is to focus on strengthening literacy in the broad field of religions and related world views, while recognising the importance of strengthening pluralist democracies through stimulating the development of active citizenship and fostering greater mutual understanding through intercultural education. It pays special attention to the educational challenges of religious diversity and conflicting value systems in schools and in society in general.
Religious Diversity and Education in Europe was originally produced by two European research groups:
ENRECA: The European Network for Religious Education in Europe through Contextual Approaches
REDCo: Religion in Education. A contribution to Dialogue or a factor of Conflict in transforming societies of European Countries
Although books will continue to be published by these two research groups, manuscripts can be submitted by scholars engaged in empirical and theoretical research on aspects of religion, and related world views, and education, especially in relation to intercultural issues. Book proposals relating to research on individual European countries or on wider European themes or European research projects are welcome. Books dealing with the interface of research, especially related to policy and practice, in European countries and contexts beyond Europe are also welcome for consideration. All manuscripts submitted are peer reviewed by two specialist reviewers.
The series is aimed at teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policy makers. The series is committed to involving practitioners in the research process and includes books by teachers and teacher educators who are engaged in research as well as academics from various relevant fields, professional researchers and PhD students (the series includes several ground-breaking PhD dissertations). It is open to authors committed to these issues, and it includes English and German speaking monographs as well as edited collections of papers.
When one considers the role that spirituality plays in management practice and pedagogy, a more fundamental issue begs to be investigated: What is spirituality? The impact spirituality has depends on how one conceives it. The authors present a two-dimensional framework that differentiates between various worldview perspectives based on divergent metaphysical and epistemological assumptions. They show how each worldview has a different conception of spirituality. Implications of worldview for management practice and pedagogy are developed. Emphasis is given to how spirituality rooted in the Christian tradition can influence management education, and examples from a private, Christian university are provided.
Only a century ago, almost all state universities held compulsory chapel services, and some required Sunday church attendance as well. In fact, state-sponsored chapel services were commonplace until the World War II era, and as late as the 1950s, it was not unusual for leading schools to refer to themselves as "Christian" institutions. Today, the once pervasive influence of religion in the intellectual and cultural life of America's preeminent colleges and universities has all but vanished. In The Soul of the American University, Marsden explores how, and why, these dramatic changes occurred. Far from a lament for a lost golden age when mainline Protestants ruled American education, The Soul of the American University offers a penetrating critique of that era, surveying the role of Protestantism in higher education from the founding of Harvard in the 1630s through the collapse of the WASP establishment in the 1960s. Marsden tells the stories of many of our pace-setting universities at defining moments in their histories, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. He recreates the religious feuds that accompanied Yale's transition from a flagship evangelical college to a university, and the dramatic debate over the place of religion in higher education between Harvard's President Charles Eliot and Princeton's President James McCosh. Marsden's analysis ranges from debates over Darwinism and higher critics of the Bible, to the roles of government and wealthy contributors, the impact of changing student mores, and even the religious functions of college football. He argues persuasively that the values of "liberalism" and "tolerance" that the establishment championed and used to marginalize Christian fundamentalism and Roman Catholicism eventually and perhaps inevitably led to its own disappearance from the educational milieu, as nonsectarian came to mean exclusively secular. While the largely voluntary disestablishment of religion may appear in many respects commendable, Marsden believes that it has nonetheless led to the infringement of the free exercise of religion in most of academic life. In effect, nonbelief has been established as the only valid academic perspective. In a provocative final chapter, Marsden spells out his own prescription for change, arguing that just as the academy has made room for feminist and multicultural perspectives, so should there be room once again for traditional religious viewpoints. A thoughtful blend of historical narrative and searching analysis, The Soul of the American University exemplifies what it advocates: that religious perspectives can provide a legitimate contribution to the highest level of scholarship.
This book explores the nature of religious faith in a provocative examination of the most massive atheism campaign in human history. That campaign occurred after the 1917 Russian Revolution, when Soviet plans for a new Marxist utopia included the total eradication of all religion. Even though the Soviet Union's attempt to secularize its society was quite successful at crushing the institutional and ritual manifestations of religion, its leaders were surprised at the persistence of religious belief. This account reveals how atheism, when taken to its extreme, can become as dogmatic and oppressive as any religious faith and illuminates the struggle for individual expression in the face of social repression.
In this thoughtful and literate study, Schwehn argues that Max Weber and several of his contemporaries led higher education astray by stressing research--the making and transmitting of knowledge--at the expense of shaping moral character. Schwehn sees an urgent need for a change in orientation and calls for a "spiritually grounded education in and for thoughtfulness." The reforms he endorses would replace individualistic behavior, the "doing my own work" syndrome derived from the Enlightenment, with a communitarian ethic grounded in Judeo-Christian spirituality. Schwehn critiques philosophies of higher education he considers misguided, from Weber and Henry Adams to Derek Bok, Allan Bloom, and William G. Perry Jr. He draws out valid insights, always showing the theological underpinnings of the so-called secular thinkers. He emphasizes the importance of community, drawing on both the secular communitarian theory of Richard Rorty and that of the Christian theorist Parker Palmer. Finally, he outlines his own prescription for a classroom-centered spiritual community of scholars. Schwehn's study will interest all those concerned with higher education in America today: faculty, students, parents, alumni, administrators, trustees, and foundation officers.
This book examines the new religious pluralism and the challenges it poses for democratic societies on both sides of the Atlantic. What are the contours of this new religious pluralism? What are its implications for the theory and practice of democracy? Does increasing religious pluralism erode the cultural and social foundations of democracy? To what extent do different religious communities embrace similar - or at least compatible-ethical and political commitments? By seeking answers to these questions, this book offers a revealing look at the future of religion in democratic societies. The book offers a structured conversation about the social and political implications of the new religious pluralism.
Academics across America are rethinking the place of religion on college and university campuses, and religion has become a hot topic of conversation. Some conversations focus on religious literacy, while others contrast religion with spirituality; some understand religion in light of specific traditions or communities of faith, while others focus attention on concerns such as personal meaning and civic engagement. The American University in a Postsecular Age brings together these divergent conversations. Three of the fourteen essays in the volume are written by the editors, including an introductory essay that explains the term "postsecular," another on church-related higher education, and a concluding essay that suggests a framework for talking about religion in the academy. The other authors represented in the book are all well known scholars in the fields of religion and higher education including, for example, Amanda Porterfield, past president of the American Society of Church History, Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Robert Wuthnow, the prolific sociologist of religion from Princeton. The volume is divided into two parts: a first group of essays focuses on religion, institutions, and faculty roles; the second group deals with the place of religion in the curriculum and in student learning. The book as a whole assumes that increased attention to religion will enhance the work of the academy, but a wide variety of perspectives are included.
The American university has embraced a thorough secularism that makes it increasingly marginal in a society that is characterized by high levels of religious belief. The very secularization that was supposed to be a liberating influence has resulted in the university's failure to provide leadership in political, cultural, social, and even scientific arenas. This book explores several different ways in which the secular university fails in its mission through its trivialization of religion. It notes how little attention is being given to defining the human, so crucial in all aspects of professional education. The book alerts us to problems associated with the prevailing secular distinction between "facts" and "values". It reviews how the elimination of religion hampers the university from understanding our post-Cold War world. The book then shows how a greater awareness of the intellectual resources of religion might stimulate more forthright attention to important matters like our loss of a sense of history, how to problematize secularism, the issue of judging religions, the oddity of academic moralizing, and the strangeness of science at the frontiers. Finally, the book invites the reader to imagine a university where religion is not ruled out but rather welcomed as a legitimate voice among others.
We hope-even as we doubt-that the environmental crisis can be controlled. Public awareness of our species' self-destructiveness as material beings in a material world is growing-but so is the destructiveness. The practical interventions needed for saving and restoring the earth will require a collective shift of such magnitude as to take on a spiritual and religious intensity. This transformation has in part already begun. Traditions of ecological theology and ecologically aware religious practice have been preparing the way for decades. Yet these traditions still remain marginal to society, academy, and church. With a fresh, transdisciplinary approach, Ecospirit probes the possibility of a green shift radical enough to permeate the ancient roots of our sensibility and the social sources of our practice. From new language for imagining the earth as a living ground to current constructions of nature in theology, science, and philosophy; from environmentalism's questioning of postmodern thought to a garden of green doctrines, rituals, and liturgies for contemporary religion, these original essays explore and expand our sense of how to proceed in the face of an ecological crisis that demands new thinking and acting. In the midst of planetary crisis, they activateimagination, humor, ritual, and hope.
Conflicts involving religion have returned to the forefront of international relations. And yet political scientists and policymakers have continued to assume that religion has long been privatized in the West. This secularist assumption ignores the contestation surrounding the category of the "secular" in international politics. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations shows why this thinking is flawed, and provides a powerful alternative. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd argues that secularist divisions between religion and politics are not fixed, as commonly assumed, but socially and historically constructed. Examining the philosophical and historical legacy of the secularist traditions that shape European and American approaches to global politics, she shows why this matters for contemporary international relations, and in particular for two critical relationships: the United States and Iran, and the European Union and Turkey. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations develops a new approach to religion and international relations that challenges realist, liberal, and constructivist assumptions that religion has been excluded from politics in the West. The first book to consider secularism as a form of political authority in its own right, it describes two forms of secularism and their far-reaching global consequences.
As Western society becomes increasingly multicultural in character, schools must reassess the provision of religious education and look at how they might adapt in order to accommodate students' diverse experiences of plurality. This book offers a critical view of approaches to the treatment of different religions in contemporary education, in order to devise approaches to teaching and learning, and to formulate policies and procedures that are fair and just to all.
The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, "animal spirits" are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the economic wisdom that got us into this mess, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform economics and restore prosperity. Akerlof and Shiller reassert the necessity of an active government role in economic policymaking by recovering the idea of animal spirits, a term John Maynard Keynes used to describe the gloom and despondence that led to the Great Depression and the changing psychology that accompanied recovery. Like Keynes, Akerlof and Shiller know that managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government--simply allowing markets to work won't do it. In rebuilding the case for a more robust, behaviorally informed Keynesianism, they detail the most pervasive effects of animal spirits in contemporary economic life--such as confidence, fear, bad faith, corruption, a concern for fairness, and the stories we tell ourselves about our economic fortunes--and show how Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the rational expectations revolution failed to account for them.
Eerdmans, 1998) Reviewed by John Peter Kenney Copyright (c) 1998 First Things 86 (October 1998): 43-50 When I entered Bowdoin in the autumn of 1970, I came as a Catholic student to what I thought was a Congregationalist college. I recall sitting at my first convocation that fall, in the splendid First Parish Church of Brunswick, and listening, with a mixture of curiosity and ecumenism, to President Roger Howell speaking from the pulpit. To my surprise, only trace elements of the Protestant religion could be detected that day. Coming from Massachusetts, where denominational apartheid then held sway, I had hoped to observe and perhaps even to imbibe some of the spirit of Protestantism. But the tepid and at best vestigial religiosity of that Convocation was by then the norm at Bowdoin. Chapel services had been eliminated as a requirement in the late sixties and were largely defunct as a voluntary endeavor by the early seventies. The old and noble Congregational tradition, with its once great zeal for salvific holiness and for social causes like abolitionism, had quietly disappeared. My old Classics professor, Nathan Dane II, a scion of the old Bowdoin, prophesied in those days that the college chapel would become in my lifetime a museum. He was only partially wrong; I understand that it now serves as a concert hall, available for occasional religious services. Bowdoin's transition from a denominational to a secular college was repeated at hundreds of academic institutions throughout the United States in this century. This puzzling and perhaps alarming phenomenon is the topic of James Burtchaell's inquiry. In order to approach this immense topic, he has written a very large book, rich in detail, sometimes diffuse in its argument, but finally compelling in its force and insight. He brings to this topic considerable authorial presence, derived from his academic training at Notre Dame and Cambridge, his experience as Provost at Notre Dame, and his theological formation as a Roman Catholic priest. As his title suggests, Burtchaell's attitude is elegiac, tempered by a withering sense of irony. Although he offers no solutions to those who rage against this dying of religious light in the academy, he does present a clear-eyed account of the forces, process, and rhetoric of its extinction.
In Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship Paul J. Weithman asks whether citizens in a liberal democracy may base their votes and their public political arguments on their religious beliefs. Drawing on empirical studies of how religion actually functions in politics, he challenges the standard view that citizens who rely on religious reasons must be prepared to make good their arguments by appealing to reasons that are 'accessible' to others. He contends that churches contribute to democracy by enriching political debate and by facilitating political participation, especially among the poor and minorities, and as a consequence, citizens acquire religiously based political views and diverse views of their own citizenship. He concludes that the philosophical view which most defensibly accommodates this diversity is one that allows ordinary citizens to draw on the views their churches have formed when voting and offering public arguments for their political positions.
Discussions involving religion's place today in politics, the academy, the media, even in shaping public policy, in essence the public square, is not without its controversy, misunderstandings and challenges. At what point, however, does use of the term religion become counter-productive or serve to impede that discussion. At what point does its use limit our understanding of the variety of other beliefs and values equally at play in the public square? Might a more inclusive term, implemented at certain times and in certain situations, be more helpful in understanding the variety of beliefs, values and principles operating in the public square? This paper suggests that use of the term worldview, rather than exclusively religion, might enhance dialogue, broaden the discussion and expand the parameters to create a more level playing field, and to examine other perspectives which contrast or compete with religion in the public square.
Knowing self cannot be accomplished without investigation of the other. Knowing self and others —in essence, understanding the human—entails engaging the larger existential or ultimate questions of life. These questions loom large and defy easy solutions, yet wrestling with them remains the hallmark of the educated person, as questions asked of others quickly become those we ask of ourselves. Posing these questions lends weight to exploring the beliefs and values that constitute one's worldview and the myriad of influences and experiences that give it shape. The study of differing worldviews enhances knowledge and critical thinking; for global citizenship and civil society leadership; for open-mindedness and discernment. This article explores worldviews—"visions of life" and "ways of life"—as an inclusive search for knowing self and others . It argues for a comprehensive approach that includes both religious and secular worldviews and offers a pedagogical model that incorporates worldview study at the undergraduate level.
Theorists of "secularization" have for two centuries been saying that religion must inevitably decline in the modern world. But today, much of the world is as religious as ever. This volume challenges the belief that the modern world is increasingly secular, showing instead that modernization more often strengthens religion. Seven leading cultural observers examine several regions and several religions and explain the resurgence of religion in world politics.Peter L. Bergeropens with a global overview. The other six writers deal with particular aspects of the religious scene: George Weigel, with Roman Catholicism;David Martin, with the evangelical Protestant upsurge not only in the Western world but also in Latin America, Africa, the Pacific rim, China, and Eastern Europe;Jonathan Sacks, with Jews and politics in the modern world;Abdullahi A. An-Na'im, with political Islam in national politics and international relations;Grace Davie, with Europe as perhaps the exception to the desecularization thesis; andTu Weiming, with religion in the People's Republic of China. "