Viewing archives for Summer reading

We continue with our ‘summer series’ of recommendations for you. We asked Geoff Teece, Linda Whitworth and Kate Christopher to tell us about something that changed their thinking. In this edition: rewilding, religious pluralism, migration and belonging.

An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent by John Hick, 2004

John Hick’s An Interpretation of Religion was published in 1989. The book won the Grawemeyer Award in 1991 for new thinking in religion.

Hick involved himself in a variety of organisations committed to good relations between people of different faiths, spending time in mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras and mandirs. Indeed, it was in one of the gurdwaras that I first met him. He was wearing a Jewish yarmulke. Such experiences led Hick to develop his pluralist hypothesis, proposing that religious communities are expressions of how each community understands what is most valuable, most important, and most holy in life.

Hick starts with the proposition that the universe is hard to make clear sense of, and is subject to interpretation. This is extremely significant for Hick’s argument. Based on this premise, Hick presents religious experience as rationally defensible as any other, such as scientific knowledge. For Hick an unspoken scientific bias means religious knowledge has come to appear illegitimate. However Hick reminds us that all human knowledge involves interpretation and subjectivity.

Hick proposes that the religious traditions we see today are cultural systems that provide spiritual paths to the transformation of the self, directed towards the transcendent. This proposal has not developed out of a purely intellectual process, but out of personal encounter.
It is the book that has had the greatest influence on my own thinking about the nature of religion and possibilities for teaching about religion.

Geoff Teece

Geoff graduated in Theology and Education from the university of Birmingham from where he also received his MEd and PhD. He has taught RE across the phases from primary pupils to undergraduate students. He was Director of the Midlands RE Centre at Westhill College and worked with Michael Grimmitt training secondary RE teachers at the university of Birmingham. He was secretary of NASACRE for ten years and won the SHAP award for ‘an outstanding contribution to the teaching of World Religions’ in 2005. Latterly he has worked at the University of Exeter. More recently he was editor of Professional Reflection in RE Today

Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah, 2017
The Arrival Shaun Tan, 2006

Reading and then discussing Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy with Initial Teacher Education students helped change my worldview. It raises a lot of issues, both as a story and a teaching text, such as refugee experience, change and belonging. It resonated deeply with many of us and challenged assumptions. Some spoke about the challenges of moving to other cultural environments or the experiences of their parents and grandparents. It altered my view of my role in the classroom as an enabler, becoming more conscious of the conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion I could facilitate with my students.

I followed up by reading Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, a graphic novel with no words. This extraordinary book raises questions about belonging in even starker terms. Its sepia appearance provides both historical and mysterious dimensions, navigating the alien yet always returning to shared human experience. It helped me recognise how important it is to acknowledge different worldviews and discuss cultural and religious navigation so that real experience is considered and human connections are made.

Linda Whitworth

Linda is a retired ITE lecturer who specialises in Primary ITE in Religion and Worldviews. She is Chair of Trustees for Culham St Gabriel’s Trust and a visiting lecturer and consultant on primary education.

Wilding: the Return to Nature of a British Farm by Isabella Tree, 2018

Like many people I experience despair and fear when I think about human impact on the planet, the tipping points we have already reached and the injustice we seem indifferent to. I feel a profound grief about what we have lost and disbelief when I see government or corporate complacency and inaction in the face of catastrophe. I bought Wilding by Isabella Tree (2018) for my brother in law’s birthday, not knowing anything about rewilding. He is a literary critic, and it seemed to be creating a buzz. I glanced into it before I wrapped it, and eventually handed it to him well-over half read. I have since bought myself a copy and read it several times.

Wilding tells of Isabella and her husband Charlie Burrows’s West Sussex farm, Knepp. After decades of running at a loss, they finally realised the denuded, impoverished land was spent, so gave it over to nature. What follows is an astonishing account of just how ready myriad species are to spring into life, if they are only given the chance. With a few measures, such as introducing free-roaming herbivores to keep the natural woodland under control, the life that had not gone away, but was merely dormant, came flooding back. Layer upon layer of fungi, insects, wildflowers, bats, lizards, songbirds slipped into their niche in the burgeoning ecosystems, allowing other species to thrive. As Professor Sir John Lawton, chair of the 2010 ‘Making Space for Nature’ states: “Knepp Estate is one of the most exciting wildlife conservation projects in the UK, and indeed in Europe. If we can bring back nature at this scale and pace just 16 miles from Gatwick airport we can do it anywhere. I’ve seen it. It’s truly wonderful, and it fills me with hope.”

I have read this process described elsewhere as like a ‘pulse’, where nature only needs human interference to pause for a short time, for life to erupt in a landscape, any landscape. All over the world, in environments and climates nothing like Southern England, rewilding projects are emerging. For example, a huge ‘rewilding Arabia’ project has restored an Arabian leopard which acts as a keystone species, playing a similar role to the cows, ponies and pigs of Knepp. I have since read much more about rewilding, such as George Monbiot’s Feral¸ and it seems to be a story of hope. Nature knows what she is doing, we just have to let her. Ultimately humans have to rewild ourselves.

Kate Christopher

Kate teaches Secondary RE and is an independent RE consultant, focusing on curriculum

Welcome to our ‘summer series’, where those in the world of RE recommend something that changed their way of seeing the world. In this first edition we bring you recommendations from Janet Orchard, Claire Clinton and Jen Jenkins on innocence and experience, liberation theology and a so-called ‘Slave Bible’

Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake, 1794
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, 1790

I studied the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, by the English poet and printmaker William Blake, during my A Level English course. The book is a collection of illustrated texts, with a radical twist, that are printed beautifully from etched plates, coloured by Blake and his wife Catherine. If the power of the poems on their own weren’t enough, my teacher took us on a trip to see original copies at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. My fascination with this work was thus cemented for a lifetime.

Blake’s work appealed to my teenage self, being unconventional, egalitarian, conscious to disrupt and depolarize, and yet bring together diverse opinion. This view can be summed in a well-known phrase from another work by Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in which he claims, “Without contraries, no progression”.

He cites contraries like attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, good and evil, seeing both together as necessary to existence. Each needs the other.

As someone who resists over-simplification at every turn, I often draw on this, to me, memorable phrase. Then there is the matter of looking for the value in someone else’s view when I disagree with them, as least in the first instance. I don’t think all views are valid; but being open to possible new ideas, composed when opposing instincts are disrupted together is an insight worth having.

Janet Orchard

Janet Orchard is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion in Teacher Education in the School of Education, University of Bristol and a former teacher. She takes a comparative interest in relationships between philosophy, religion, and teacher education specialising in England, Hong Kong and the Western Cape (South Africa). She edits Professional Reflection.

A Theology of Liberation: History, power and salvation by Gustavo Gutierrez, 1988
For my people: Black Theology and the Black Church by James H Cone, 1984

Both these books changed my way of thinking about the world. At the time I was a newly qualified RE teacher delivering units on Liberation Theology and Black Theology for a new A- Level RS course. There were no materials for students to learn about these theologies, just a book list as a teacher I needed to get through and create a unit of study for my students.

I was a white, British woman who had just finished a tradition theology degree and RE PGCE at Durham and Cambridge Universities – both very traditional places where these topics hadn’t come up, so everything was new learning for me.

I had no conception of what life had been like for the people of Latin America and how white western worldviews had interpreted the Bible in certain ways that Gustavo wrote about and challenged. Then I knew a little of the Civil Rights movement in America in the 1960’s to 70’s, but again reading the book by James completely immersed me in a different world. A different way of seeing the world through other people’s experiences that involved oppression and poverty.

I had learnt a little about hermeneutics at university, but now I was absorbed in what this meant in the 20th Century for theologians living in a very different world from my own. These theologians wanted to give a voice to the people they lived with and worked alongside. Before reading these books I would not really have consciously thought about my own worldview, nor my own privilege. Therefore these were transformative reads for me to see the complexity of belief and practice, power, privilege and injustice. They were foundational for me to understand the importance of listening and hearing diverse voices and how a sacred text can be interpreted in different ways without any recognition of this taking place. These books were uncomfortable reads for me in places as they challenged me to see religion in more actively political terms. I was also challenged to see myself as part of the silent majority that allows oppression to take place.

Claire Clinton

Claire is RE Advisor for Newham, Barking and Dagenham and Director of the national RE Hubs.

Museum of the Bible: ‘Slave Bible’

Through engaging with the Diocese of Coventry’s anti-racist learning community, Amazing Grace, I discovered this very troubling form of biblical interpretation. This is the so-called ‘slave bible’. You can find out about it through videos and information video on the Museum of the Bible link below.

The ‘Slave Bible’ (as it came to be known) was originally published in London in 1807 on behalf of the Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves, an organisation with the expressed intention of improving the lives of enslaved Africans put to work in Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean. This version of the bible was edited with significant parts of the Bible missing, such as the story of the Exodus where the Israelites were released from slavery in Egypt and passages in Paul’s letters that suggest an equality between slaves and masters. Certain passages were deliberately left in, such as the curse of Ham by Noah in the Genesis narrative which even the church at the time of the transatlantic slave trade felt comfortable to use as a justification for the enslavement of races considered to be ‘inferior’ to Europeans. Likewise, the guidance in the Pauline letters regarding slaves obeying their masters was retained as part of a deliberate hermeneutic intended to convince Black Africans they were justifiably enslaved.

The intention in using this missionary book was to indoctrinate slaves into the Christian faith. It was also used to teach African slaves to read (which I am assuming was meant to be a ‘noble’ intention at the time). This use of the Bible to perpetuate one of history’s most deplorable grand narratives is deeply shocking.

If this is your initial discovery of the existence of this text, I am sure you are deeply troubled by it. It is important to also consider the reactions of your pupils and to approach this with absolute sensitivity if you plan to share its existence with pupils.

for more information: https://www.museumofthebible.org/exhibits/slave-bible

Jen Jenkins

Jen is RE & Spirituality Officer for Coventry Diocesan Board of Education and RE Facilitator for Coventry and Warwickshire.

In our final edition of summer reading recommendations, we bring you  Islamic art, love and monotheism.

Aliya Azam teaches at Al-Sadiq and Al- Zahra school in West London. She works closely with RE teachers and interfaith groups.
Islamic Art and Spirituality

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

State University of New York Press, 1987

I recommend this book because to me is appears to be unique. Seyyed Nasr describes many aspects of Islamic art, from the chanting of the Holy Qur’an, which is the most central expression of the Islamic revelation, and therefore sacred art par excellence, to calligraphy and architecture which are the “embodiments” in the worlds of form and space of the Divine Word. Through this book the sacred art of Islam is revealed, which has always played and continues to play a fundamental role in the spiritual life of Muslims.

The goal of the spiritual, or inward, life in Islam is to reach the Divine. Seyyed Nasr shows how for Muslims in all societies art provides a climate of peace and equilibrium. Art creates an ambience in which God can be remembered.

For teachers, unlocking Islamic art is a wonderful way to explore Islamic beliefs, culture and spirituality. Islam considers beauty as the necessary complement of the manifestation of the Truth. We could say art is a ‘silent theology’. The language of beauty is a universal language that draws us together and in Islam art is a gate towards the inner life.

Alexis Stones is Subject Lead for the PGCE on Religious Education at the Institute of Education, UCL’s faculty of Education and society.

All About Love

bell hooks

William Morrow and Company, 2016

This incredible book is written from the heart for the heart. The genius of bell hooks is heard through her honest discussions and her call for love to be more crucial in our lives. She reminds us that love is the most important resource for individuals, groups and community. This treatise on love taught me that love is fierce in its strengths. It teaches, guides, forgives and challenges.

As a teacher educator, I encourage student teachers to reflect on their own perspectives and become familiar with the complexities of their own worldviews. All About Love dedicates a chapter to love into fourteen different contexts including justice, spirituality and community. These function as lenses to think about how love manifests across time and space. There are religious, philosophical, ethical, sociological and psychological perspectives that are thought-provoking, humbling and inspiring. It allows me to think about RE on my own terms before I teach.

Kate Christopher is a Secondary teacher and consultant.

The Price of Monotheism

Jan Assman

English translation by Robert Savage

Stanford University Press, 2010

I have become interested in monotheism as a hugely powerful worldview, but one that is rarely the subject of study itself. Someone recommended Assman to me. It is a challenging read, but worth the effort. Assman argues that the shift to monotheism brought into being an idea hitherto alien to the ancient world; the idea of false gods or false religion. Assman states that monotheism is not a distinction between one God and many gods, but between ‘truth and falsehood in religion’ (p. 2).

It is a shift that took millennia. In polytheistic times, pledges and contracts were sealed with oaths of loyalty to a deity. Neighbouring tribes had to establish the corresponding deity in dealing with each other. By 3,000 BCE, ‘tables of divine equivalence’ had been created to allow commerce, allegiance and collaboration among tribes (p. 19). None of this is possible once all other gods are deemed to be false. This is an example of how monotheism changed the way different groups could engage with each other.

Assman is an Egyptologist rather than a theologian, although he appears to me extremely well-versed in theology. His thesis, not unexpectedly, has received significant challenge, such as of anti-Semitism and intolerance, and he spends much of this  volume addressing the challenges. I probably wouldn’t teach this before A Level, and I am not expert enough in Assman’s field to know how outlandish or mainstream his argument is. I recommend it because it reminds us as educators to look beyond the world as we find it and dig a bit deeper. Although so widespread we might take it for granted, monotheism is a worldview too, and as such can be investigated.

Continuing our series of short recommendations from the Religion and Worldviews community, this week we bring you the warmth of the black Pentecostal church, an Ahmadiyya philosophy of the teaching of Islam, and how humans recover after catastrophe. Enjoy!

Alexandra Brown is an RE teacher, poet and academic decolonial practitioner whose work, thoughts and ontology resides in liminal spaces

In My Grandmother’s House: Black Women’s Faith and the Stories we inherit

Dr Yolanda Pierce

Broadleaf Books, Minneapolis, USA, 2021

Following the painful, and yet inevitable, realisation that my previous place of worship was unable to speak to my lived experience as a black woman, whose theological posture uncompromisingly encompasses Womanist theology, radical black queer politics and social justice, this book acted as a gift, a warm embrace, and a timely affirmation, that I too am created in Imago Dei.

In typical Womanist fashion, through the use of stories, and an unapologetic centering of the African-American woman’s lived experience, Dr Pierce successfully critiques rigid Eurocentric-Cartesian approaches to Christian beliefs, practices and rituals, whilst simultaneously sharing the beauty and depth that lies within a Protestant-Pentecostal tradition.

The chapters that explore sacred traditions within the black church such as washing feet, a shared witness of grief on Maundy Thursday and knowledge of Jesus as a personal friend, were truly wonderful to read and acted as gentle reminders that there is sacredness in my embodied experience.

Including elements of Dr Peirce’s book into lessons, will also act as an effective means to help decolonise your lessons and broader curriculum, for example when teaching Christian Practices on the GCSE.

Waqar Ahmedi is Head of RS and author of GCSE and A level textbooks and revision guides. He serves on the NATRE Executive and is part of Birmingham SACRE representing the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association UK.

The Philosophy of the Teachings of Islam

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad

English translation by Muhammad Zafrulla Khan

Islam International Publications Ltd, 2010

Available for free here: https://www.alislam.org/book/philosophy-teachings-islam/

My book recommendation is The Philosophy of the Teachings of Islam by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.

It is based on a lecture given at the Conference of Great Religions in India in 1896 where experts from different faiths were asked to address specific topics based solely on their own holy texts and tenets. These included the physical, moral and spiritual states of humanity, the purpose of life and ways to fulfil it, and what happens after death.

Ahmad cites only the Qur’an to present his impressive exposition and offers a unique insight into Islamic philosophy, ethics and theology, as well as a distinct Muslim worldview of what it means to be human. Additionally, he provides a compelling case for the existence of a Living God.

The Philosophy of the Teachings of Islam is a brilliant exegesis – as pertinent today as it has ever been – that will enrich every RE department’s library and enhance the quality of teaching and learning about Islam as part of a diversified curriculum. This and many of Ahmad’s other works also make him ideal as a scholar, thinker and figure to be studied in his own right.

Another great benefit of this book is that it’s available for free in various formats online, as the link above shows.

Ben Maddison is a teacher, trainer and lecturer.

When the Dust Settles: Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster

Lucy Easthope

Hodder and Stoughton, 2022

Lucy Easthope is a disaster recovery expert and this is her memoir. She talks about her involvement in events such as the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and Grenfell Tower fire.

She blends together the practical details of how people deal with recovery after a disaster with reflections on what this tells us about being human. Easthope uses the sociological phrase ‘the furniture of the self’ to explore the internal recovery the people affected by catastrophe. The idea of the furniture of the self is used to explore how we build resilience as human beings facing catastrophe.

I often find myself picking up a book for use in a lesson. I came across this book because I wanted to look at the events surrounding the Grenfell Fire on the 5^th anniversary of the tragedy and found it fascinating. The insights from this book sat at the core of my lesson. It helped to sew together emotions and practicalities. I found it accessible, interesting and thought provoking, and one of those books where you pause after a paragraph and think about what you have just read.

In our ‘summer series’ we bring you a range of reading recommendations from a wide variety of people involved in Religion and Worldviews. As subject specialists, whatever age range we teach, it is always good to know about new books, or books that have helped others with their understanding.

In our first edition, we present recommendations on the ways psychotherapy draws on religious thinking and an investigation into worldviews. Enjoy!

Dr Alastair Lockhart, Director of the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements www.censamm.org

Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies

Don Browning and Terry Cooper (2^nd edition)

Fortress Press, Augsburg, USA, 2004

I’d like to recommend Don Browning and Terry Cooper’s Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies. The second edition came out in 2004, extending the ideas developed in the original 1987 edition which was written by Browning without Cooper. The book excavates the ways in which psychological theories – and especially psychotherapeutic forms of psychology – encode or draw on religious and ethical forms of thought.

While the idea that psychotherapeutic psychologies might have a mixed pedigree, so we can understand them as less than “strictly scientific”, is perhaps not as challenging today as it once was, Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies was an important milestone in my own engagement with the practical ways that psychological approaches can be examined as “religio-ethical thinking… mixed disciplines which contain examples of religious, ethical, and scientific language”.

Ultimately, for me, the conclusions of the book are perhaps secondary in significance to the core exercise it carries out: a powerful critical archaeology of the complexity of psychological ways of viewing the world, which has implications for how we understand the common ground between religious and scientific ways of thinking more generally.

Kathryn Wright, CEO, Culham St Gabriel’s Trust

Worldview Religious Studies

Douglas J Davies

Routledge, 2022

The opening paragraph of this fascinating, yet challenging book sums up for me why it is an essential read for everyone wanting to explore a worldviews approach to religious education.

Davies begins with a bold claim that worldviews emerge, intensify, and change. From the outset, Davies wants us to grasp hold of the value and importance of worldview thinking for education. For him worldviews are dynamic, and this resonates with me and the ever-changing nature of curriculum in our schools.

Davies follows an interdisciplinary approach offering a provisional framing for how worldviews may be studied in higher education. He begins with a detailed journey through different historical and philosophical understandings of the concept of worldview. He concludes that worldviews can be understood at different levels in relation to meaning-making, attachment, and orientation to the world (p.20). This leads him to offer different concepts through which worldviews may be studied (p.33f). He begins with destiny, identity and hope arguing that these are a characteristic of many worldviews. He advocates for studying ritual-symbolism, such as mantras, creeds, pilgrimage and so on. Related to this is the notion of gift theory whereby ordinary life exists in and through processes of reciprocity. Lastly, he claims that all worldviews have underlying ideas of evil, merit, and salvation; where evil depicts perceived flaws in existence and salvation offers ways of overcoming them (p.43).

It made me wonder whether this could provide a framing for studying religion and worldviews in schools?

The second half of the book offers some provisional classification of worldviews with religious studies, theology and ethics topics in mind. Davies is very open about the need for it to be improved in the future! He puts forward eight types, namely, natural; scientific; ancestral; karmic; prophetic-sectarian; mystical; ideological and ludic. He also acknowledges that there may be overlap between them as worldviews change, and some worldview traditions may sit within many different ‘types’. Whilst I am not completely convinced by his categorisation, one thing that did strike me was the overwhelming sense that we should begin study within a particular context and with people. I would also argue that his approach is a hermeneutical one; he talks about ‘seeing-through’, being human-curious and self-aware. Reflexivity lies at the heart of his approach. He acknowledges that this may be personally challenging (p.123).

This is an important book for the religion and worldviews community. It is not easy to read in places, but it is worth persevering! I would be interested to see if any curriculum designers take up his approach for schools…

You can also listen to Douglas Davies talk about his book at an online Religion Media Centre event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7VPvnfK5TU (from 26:31)