The Hermeneutics of Religious Understanding in a Postsecular Age David Lewin, University of Strathclyde School of Education
Introduction This article draws upon philosophical hermeneutics to indicate the rich interpretive possibilities that exist within religious traditions themselves. This is in contrast to the reductive views of what it means to be religious often associated with more fundamentalist religious orientations, which tend to boil down to competing and irreconcilable truth claims. What has come to be known as the postsecular age offers an opportunity to reexamine the significance of religion in public life by engaging with more nuanced interpretive traditions. This hermeneutical (re)turn gives religious perspectives opportunities to demonstrate creative relationships with modernity that are not predicated on the assumption that religion is an uncritical commitment to be separated from public life. I argue, in fact, that religious commitments must be opened up to deliberative culture if either religions or public life are to flourish. There are several implications for education. First, the problem of indoctrination that characterizes much educational theory presupposes the kind of non-deliberative and hermeneutically naïve religiosity that I am keen to question. If the terms of the debate can be shifted, then we can move beyond problems of indoctrination. Second, religious education can operate as a space in which deliberative culture can be nourished. By this I mean that religious educators need to take seriously that the different views of students are not simply private preferences in a plural world, but bear upon the lived experience of meaning. To disregard the claims to ‘truth’, as some phenomenological approaches do, is not simply a mark of tolerance and inclusion. Third, faith schools demonstrate just how much distance there is between a
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