ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the place of the religious in educational experience. The claim that religious ideals and impulses are a central dimension in human experience is a bold one and it is likely to be dismissed by many. Human experience can be greatly enriched through sustained encounters with religious traditions in environments of learning that are venturesome, co-operative, and safe. When religious traditions are introduced in schools, care needs to be taken that this is done on a different set of presuppositions than when such traditions are introduced in churches, mosques, synagogues, or other places of worship. Religious traditions outside of Christianity came to be viewed with a particular disfavour in Western Christendom. The cultivation of religious literacy provides unique opportunities to understand how 'the favourable disposition towards piety' might be take quite different fruitful paths among the plurality of humankind, but also why religion can give rise to strife and bloodshed.
