ABSTRACT
On Holy Ground: The theory and practice of religious education, by Liam Gearon, is an important study that raises critical questions about the educational legitimacy of non-confessional religious education. On Holy Ground examines the re-reading of the holy through the texts of modernity, not simply in its rejection of revelation as a source of knowledge but, more widely, the loss of the sacred and the conscious removal of the sacred-profane, holy-unholy distinctions. Gearon finds inspiration and opposition to the Enlightenment’s critique of religion and its appropriation by other disciplines and writers for their non-religious purposes in Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige, first published in 1917. Otto’s account of the holy focuses on the relationship of the rational to the non-rational in religion, giving priority to the latter, in contrast to much of the prevailing religious apologetics of his day.
