Challenges Facing Religious Education in Contemporary Ireland

Originally presented as a lecture at the National Religious Education Congress I Arise Today in October 2007, this book analyses the changing cultural context of the new Ireland in which Religious Education must take place: the advent of modernity overnight, the reality of multiculturalism and the turn to spirituality.

To address this new situation, Dermot A. Lane proposes what he calls the need at this time for Inter-Religious Education. He discusses how the vision of Vatican II can animate the work of Inter-Religious Education and concludes with an emphasis on the reactivation of the Catholic imagination and the possibility of affirming a critically informed Catholic modernity. Huge cultural changes have taken place in Ireland in the last fifteen years and these changes present Religious Education with a series of new challenges. Dermot A. Lane argues that these challenges should not be seen as a threat, but rather as a unique opportunity for Religious Education in secondary schools and the wider community.