Canada

Excerpt: The first Europeans to inhabit what is now Canada came from Norse countries about 1000 AD to spend at least two winters at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northwestern tip of Newfoundland. No evidence remains of any Christian religious activity on the part of these occupants. During the age of exploration, Europeans from many nations came to Canada for various reasons, including trade, political expansion, and Christian missions to the First Nations peoples already resident in Canada. As a result of such mission work, and the replication or expansion of churches from the European countries of origin of Canadian immigrants, church-sponsored education was widespread by the time Canada gained nationhood in 1867

Sommerville\u27s Religious Ideas for Secular Universities - Book Review

Review of C. John Sommerville\u27s Religious Ideas for Secular Universities, originally published in Christian Scholar\u27s Review, 40(1), 2010. http://www.csreview.org

Two \u27Cop-Outs\u27 in Faith-Learning Integration: Incarnational Integration and Worldviewish Integration

There are at least six different approaches to integration adopted by educationalists in recent years. These interconnect and may partially overlap. Two kinds of confusion in talk of integration are identified, along with four other substantive questions that would-be faith-learning, integrationists need to address. Neither incarnational integration nor perspectival integration are adequate on their own. Evangelical and Reformed traditions are both at their best when they combine incarnational and perspectival in their efforts to integrate faith and learning

Review of Maria Harris & Gabriel Moran\u27s Reshaping Religious Education: Conversations on Contemporary Practice

Christian educators around the world, especially those who work in congregational settings, will recognise the names of Maria Harris and Gabriel Moran. This couple is a team both in and out of the classroom, and Reshaping Religious Education: Conversations on Contemporary Practice is their comment on the changes they have observed in religious education throughout four decades of their own work in the field in the North American context. They describe several features of current religious education, and explore directions for future religious education needs

A Review of “Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education

In Compromising Scholarship, Yancey argues that politically conservative persons, religiously conservative persons, and especially politically, religiously conservative persons face a disadvantage when seeking either employment or a fair hearing in the contemporary American academy, especially in the social sciences and humanities. Several times while reading this book, I recalled a job interview of my own at a university in Canada. One interviewer asked whether my religious convictions might undermine my ability to teach courses in a program that prepared teachers for service in Saskatchewan’s public schools. I noted that, while the question was illegal under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I welcomed it because I believed that all professors carried out their work on the basis of one vision of the good life or another and that my own worldview was consistent with the very dispositions that Saskatchewan desired in its teachers. I added that, politically, I was likely well to the left of anyone else in the room. Alas, my leftist politics proved unequal to the needed redemption of my faith convictions, and the job went to another person, presumably someone lacking bias or prejudice

Book Review of Ronald B. Hoch and David P. Smith’s Old School, New Clothes: The Cultural Blindness of Christian Education

Excerpt: In Old Schoo; New Clothes, Hoch and Smith accuse Christian schools of being blind to the forces and forms of modernity, in fact not only blind, but founded on the very same principles as public schools. This cultural blindness extends to the institutions that train Christian school teachers, to administrators, teachers and parents. Hoch and Smith want to explore the roots of this widespread cultural blindness and its effects, and they want to point to ways forward