The opening decade of the twenty first century brought increased attention to religion as an important dimension of culture and politics. Early in this period, the dramatic multi-pronged attacks of September 11, 2001 ushered in an awareness of potential large-scale terrorist threats undertaken by a small group with religious motivations. Over the same period we came to see an increase in conservative religious groups’ activities in politics. In the US we see this as an evolution from televangelist Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority that emerged as a force in the late 1970s and as the beginning of the New Religious Right. On further reflection, however, we see the involvement of religion extending much further back as a fundamental part of our social organisation rather than a new or emerging phenomenon. We need only note the religious wars of early modern Europe or the contentious development of the US church and state doctrine as evidences of religion’s longstanding role as a source of competing values and beliefs. That said, there has indeed been a significant upturn in research and scholarship across many disciplines relative to the study of religion in the last decade and more. This is particularly the case in the area of the relationship of education and religion.
Religious education, or study toward formation in a particular faith tradition, has been with us for millennia, study about religion as an academic subject apart from theology is more recent. Whereas theology departments proceeded from religious assumptions aiming to promulgate a faith tradition, the religious studies field emerged as a discipline that sought to bring a more disinterested social scientific approach to the study of religion. The origins of this approach date back to the European research centers that influenced US scholars beginning in the eighteenth century. The formalisation of this trend, however, is a fairly recent phenomenon as illustrated by the 1949 formation of Society for the Scientific Study of Religion with its own scholarly journal and the creation of religious studies departments across the US in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision in 1963 that allowed teaching about religion (rather than for) in public education institutions. It was also that same year that the American Academy of Religion was born out of a group of scholars that had since 1909 been meeting under the various names related to Biblical Study.
It is out of this relatively recent increase in scholarly attention to religion and education that this new book series appears. Routledge Publishers have long been an important presence in the respective fields of religion and of education. It seemed like a natural step to introduce a book series focused particularly on Research in Religion and Education. My appreciation extends to Max Novick for guiding this series into being and now to Stacy Noto for continuing Routledge’s oversight.
It further seems entirely appropriate that the first volume in this series be about the work and influence of one scholar in particular who has exercised distinguished leadership in this field of religion and education for many years, Professor Robert Jackson, from 1994 to 2012, the Director of the University of Warwick’s Religions and Education Research Unit. Professor Jackson’s work in higher education spans forty years and has impacted the scholarship of religion and education around the world. His early ethnographic research on Hindu communities in the United Kingdom developed into what he called an ‘interpretive approach’ to the study of religion education producing important work that led to the recognition by the distinguished Templeton UK Award in 1996. His two books, Religious Education: An Interpretive Approach (1997) and Rethinking Religious Education and Plurality: Issues in Diversity and Pedagogy (2004) are landmark contributions to the field.
My thanks to Joyce Miller, Kevin O’Grady and Ursula McKenna for their excellent work in editing this first volume of the series.
Michael D. Waggoner
Professor and Series Editor, Research in Religion and Education
Editor, Religion & Education