A superb collection of contemporary research on German-language religious education. Professor Julian Stern, Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK Although specific contexts differ between and within countries, the issues and challenges regarding religious education in schools are essentially the same worldwide. It is therefore very valuable and relevant that this volume makes the rich insights and approaches to religious education developed and brought together by German scholars ava...

How pupils can learn from different religions and the principles that guide pedagogy in this area are important issues that are common to religious education as practised in different places and locations. Such issues raise questions about the proper understanding of religion, of perspectivity and of how to identify and distinguish the aims and goals of religious education. The focus of this book is on inter-religious learning, i.e. learning beyond the boundaries of one religion, which is ...

Schweitzer’s goal in this book is to explore what postmodernity actually means for theology and how theology and the church may respond to its challenges. He focuses on the life cycle as it is changing with the advent of postmodernity, looking sequentially at segments of the life cycle using different lenses: modernity, postmodernity, and responses from church and theology. Schweitzer concludes with a theology of the life cycle.

Since the politicization of anthropology in the 1970s, most anthropologists have been reluctant to approach the topic of universals—that is, phenomena that occur regularly in all known human societies. In this volume, Christoph Antweiler reasserts the importance of these cross-cultural commonalities for anthropological research and for life and co-existence beyond the academy. The question presented here is how anthropology can help us approach humanity in its entirety, understanding the w...

The basic concern of the volume is to determine the preconditions of personality development and to show their significance and their perspectives for educational science and for pedagogical practice. First, these basic preconditions of becoming oneself are collected in a single volume and discussed in terms of their significance for science and for educational practice. In all fundamental dimensions are understood as precondition of becoming oneself. “Bildung” is here for the first time u...

Psychologists and philosophers have assumed that psychological knowledge is knowledge about, and held by, the individual mind. Psychological Knowledge challenges these views. It argues that bodies of psychological knowledge are social institutions like money or the monarchy, and that mental states are social artefacts like coins or crowns.Martin Kusch takes on arguments of alternative proposals, shows what is wrong with them, and demonstrates how his own social-philosophica...

This book covers Rudolf Steiner’s biography, presented from an educational point of view and also unfolds the different aspects of Steiner’s educational thought in Waldorf Education. His point of view is unique in that it relates education to a wide horizon of different contexts, such as social, pedagogical, evolutionary and spiritual aspects. His ideas are philosophical (ethical, epistemological, ontological). However, above all, they are based on spiritual understanding of the human bein...

Constructivism has been traded as a new paradigm by its advocates, and criticised by its opponents as legitimating deceit and lies, as justifying a trendy post-modern "Anything goes".In this book, Bernhard Poerksen draws up a new rationale for constructivist thinking and charts out directions for the imaginative examination of personal certainties and the certainties of others, of ideologies great and small. The focus of the debate is on the author's thesis that our understanding of journa...

Religious and cultural diversity are increasingly visible today. At the same time, increased fear of the «other» has manifested, particularly of the Islamic religion. Islam today is considered a «problematic» religion. This attitude yields many challenges in universities and schools, particularly when it comes to religious education. The Institute for Islamic Theology and Religious Education and the Catholic Religious Education Department at the University of Innsbruck are addressing these...

Life is full of transitions. These transitions have to be addressed, shaped, processed and integrated into our lives in some way. Regardless of the belief in a God, traditional structures always come into view, here especially religiously traditional rites of passage such as baptism and circumcision, communion and bar mitzvah, marriage as well as convalescence, death and funeral rites. What is the psychological function of religiously traditional rites of passage today? This question will ...

As one of the premier historical thinkers of his generation, Jörn Rüsen has made enormous contributions to the methods and theoretical framework of history as it is practiced today. In Evidence and Meaning, Rüsen surveys the seismic changes that have shaped the historical profession over the last half-century, while offering a clear, economical account of his theory of history. To traditional historiography Rüsen brings theoretical insights from philosophy, narrative theory, cultu...

In this book, Ewers provides students and professors with a new system of categorization for a differentiated description of children’s literature. In the early 1970s, Swedish children’s literature scholar Göte Kingberg worked to establish a system of scientific terminology for international use, but these terms are now somewhat antiquated. This book offers a much-needed update, systematically analyzing the field and articulating its key definitions, terms, and concepts.Internation...