Religious Education, Spiritual Experience and Truth

Religious education is the process of exploring spiritual experience through the conceptual frameworks provided by religious texts, and of seeking to find meaning in those texts that is relevant to the development of the spiritual interests of pupils. Objective enquiry in relation to those texts does not require the assumption that there is a mind‐independent and separate reality, but can be based on understanding religious literature as part of a constructed world of theories, ideas and artefacts similar to those constructions that we find in the world of the arts. There are no ultimate meanings or truths in relation to this world but there is the possibility of rational and objective discussion based on information and shared experiences of its ideas and objects. The descriptions and explanations that are explored in this context have, to a greater or lesser degree, an incompleteness, or ‘conceptual spaces’, within them. The exploration of such spaces requires imagination and sensitivity to the issues a...