Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student

This article explores the formation of British evangelical university students as believers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation in London, I describe how students in this church come to embody a highly cognitive, word-based mode of belief through particular material practices. As they learn to identify themselves as believers, practices of reflexivity and accountability enable them to develop a sense of narrative coherence in their lives that allows them to negotiate tensions that arise from their participation in church and broader social structures. I demonstrate that propositional belief – in contexts where it becomes an identity marker – is bound up with relational practices of belief, such that distinctions between “belief in” and “belief that” are necessarily blurred in the lives of young evangelicals

Levinas, Durkheim, and the Everyday Ethics of Education

This article explores the influence of Émile Durkheim on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in order both to open up the political significance of Levinas’s thought and to develop more expansive meanings of moral and political community within education. Education was a central preoccupation for both thinkers: Durkheim saw secular education as the site for promoting the values of organic solidarity, while Levinas was throughout his professional life engaged in debates on Jewish education and conceptualized ethical subjectivity as a condition of being taught. Durkheim has been accused of dissolving the moral into the social, and his view of education as a means of imparting a sense of civic republican values is sometimes seen as conservative, while Levinas’s argument for an ‘unfounded foundation’ for morality is sometimes seen as paralyzing the impetus for concrete political action. Against these interpretations, I argue that their approaches present provocative challenges for conceptualizing the nature of the social, offering theoretical resources to deepen understanding of education as the site of an everyday ethics and a prophetic politics opening onto more compelling ideals for education than those dominant within standard educational discourses

Education: Expectation and the Unexpected

In this paper I consider the concept of expectation in Higher Education. To focus the discussion I begin by sketching out some examples of how this notion pervades a number of practices in the university, and how in particular, expectation drives the way that the university tutorial operates between tutors and students. In relating this to the tendency towards what has been identified as the marketization and consumerism of higher education, I draw on the distinction that Paul Standish identifies between and ‘economy of exchange’ and an ‘economy of excess’, and suggest how expectation and responsibility figure in these economies. In moving to think beyond narrow conceptions of expectation and responsibility, and beyond the literature on policy and management in higher education, I turn to the work of the Jewish philosophers, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas to show how they have both given attention to richer ideas of relationship, responsibility and the other. I initially outline Buber’s central work on the distinction between I-It and I-Thou modes of relationship, and how the latter is characterised by a dialogic intersubjectivity. I contrast this with the work of Emmanuel Levinas and draw out the distinction between the mutuality at the heart of Buber’s work, and the relationship of asymmetry that mark’s Levinas’ conception of our responsibility to the other, which is ethics. Having drawn the distinction, I then show how there are lines of connection in their respective philosophical projects, specifically how speech or dialogue is central to the relationship with the other in both thinkers. I find in both Buber and Levinas that speech cannot be thought of solely as communication. This has significant implications for education: speech is not simply the communication of (curricular) content between tutor and student. Given this, teaching can be thought of as a space for encounter with the other through language. This has further implications for thinking about the place of the tutorial in a university education. At this point I return to the scene of the university tutorial and suggest that, rather than seeing it as a place only for the meeting of expectations (which would suggest a closed economy of exchange), it might be envisioned as a space for encounter with the unexpected. In considering the nature of the encounter in relation to an example from the film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, I argue that the tutorial opens up the possibility for a mutual encounter with otherness. This positions the tutorial as a space of educational otherness, - a Foucauldian heterotopia which rejects the expectation-bound economy of exchange, and which offers instead the possibility of an education marked instead by an economy of excess. <br/

The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood

From recent sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, to arguments about faith schools and religious indoctrination, this volume considers the interconnection between the actual lives of children and the position of children as placeholders for the future. Childhood has often been a particular site of struggle for negotiating the location of religion in public and everyday social life, and children's involvement and non-involvement in religion raises strong feelings because they represent the future of religious and secular communities, even of society itself. The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood provides a rich resource for students and scholars of this interdisciplinary field, and addresses wider questions about the distinctiveness of childhood and its religious dimensions in historical and contemporary perspective

'Just leave it blank' non-religious children and their negotiation of prayer in school

This article examines how non-religious children experience acts of collective worship and prayer in primary school settings and analyses how they negotiate religion and their non-religious identities in these events. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork examining non-religious childhoods and collective worship in three English primary schools, the authors explore how non-religious children demonstrate their agency when confronted with particular boundaries and concepts related to religion and non-religion in school contexts. Attending to the experiences, perspectives, and practices of non-religious children adds to our understanding of the varieties of non-religion, which has to date largely focused on elite, adult populations. Focusing on non-religious children’s experiences of prayer reveals how these children did not experience tensions between praying to God and their non-religious identities and articulated their own interpretations of these practices, deepening understanding of the lived realities of non-religious cultures and identities

The Church of England and the 1870 Elementary Education Act

Set against the background of mid-nineteenth century concerns about an erosion in the denomination’s standing and influence, this article highlights the differing responses to the matter from parties within the Church of England, which determined their degree of sympathy with proposals for an education act. Specifically, we point out that the debate over schooling between co-religionists centred upon rival understandings of religious education: ‘denominational’ and ‘undenominational’. We examine the claims of some contemporary High Church leaders and later commentators, that acceding to elements of the 1870 Act, specifically the ‘conscience’ and ‘Cowper-Temple’ clauses, represented a pyrrhic victory and that in doing so the Church appeared to resile from its place in society. However, we argue that, though the Church could no longer be described as ‘England’s educator’, it retained considerable influence within the evolving school system and in policymaking. Moreover, we point out that ‘denominational’ religious education continued to be championed, having diffusive influence, well into the twentieth century. Finally, just as understanding nineteenth-century ecclesiastical history and religious culture is crucial to understanding this moment in the educational past, we argue that a thoroughgoing religious historical literacy is essential to understanding educational policy development regardless of the period under scrutiny