Reading religion in Norwegian textbooks: are individual religions ideas or people?

Different religions are treated in different ways in Norwegian sixth form textbooks. We carried out an exhaustive content analysis of the chapters devoted to individual religions in textbooks for the Religion and Ethics course currently available in Norway, using rigorous indicators to code each word, image and question according to whether they were treated the religion as a set of ideas or a group of people. After adjusting for trends in the different kinds of data (word, image, question), we found that Buddhism and Christianity receive significantly more attention for their ideas than Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, which are treated more as people. This difference cannot be explained by the national syllabus or the particularities of the individual religions. The asymmetry also has implications for the pupils’ academic, moral and pedagogical agency for which teachers play a critical role in compensating.acceptedVersio

Norway: Religion in the Prison System

This chapter provides a basic overview of the regulation of religion in the Norwegian prison system. After a brief introduction, the chapter maps the role of religion in Norwegian correctional facilities from a historical perspective and examines the changing demography of the prisoner population. In the main section of the chapter, the legal and institutional framework for the management of religion in Norwegian correctional facilities is examined in some detail, with an emphasis on how the regulation of religion during imprisonment interacts with other regulations of religion in Norway, what specific international and domestic provisions regulate religion during incarceration, the role of clergy and other religious leaders, and the management of religion as an operational issue for prison staff, including the growing concern with prisons as hotbeds of radical and violent extremism