ABSTRACT
It is important in our teaching to use stories and images from religion because children should learn about the world and its peoples. The media remind us, year by year, month by month, minute by minute, that we, those peoples, are both similar and different from each other, and religion is the oldest base for both the similarities and the differences. In studying it we examine the tingles that shoot along our nerves when we pray, blaspheme, meditate or wonder. In religion we see the roots of our literature and all our art, and the roots of the literature and art of the whole world. Also, we need to make informed decisions about what is the good life. To attempt those decisions without addressing religion is to live, as someone has said in Gaarder (1995), from hand to mouth. It is to be seduced by a materialism that will surely leave us in the dangerous dark.
