ABSTRACT

Religious Education (RE) is concerned with explicit or implicit attempts to explore and encounter God, to experience the sacred, to search for faith, to call people to live spiritually. The context within which RE takes place at the present time presents considerable challenges to the religious educator. Since colonial times educational policy has insisted that state education is secular and no RE is taught as part of the formal compulsory curriculum. The Australian Association of Religious Education and the Dialogue Australia Network bring together staff from the independent and Catholic sector to develop curriculum and theoretical approaches to RE. The kerygmatic approach grew out of the work of Jungmann and Hofinger who had been influenced by the upsurge in scriptural scholarship in Europe. An Australian academic, educator and researcher Maurice Ryan, surveyed the literature of RE and argued that three rival conceptions of curriculum were being translated into the RE classroom.