ABSTRACT
In the wake of the 'phenomenological' turn, Religious Education (RE) in the British common school seems to have gone in the directions of both more and less. Some dubious philosophical assumptions underly modern conceptions of religious discourse and education as apparent, in tensions between literalist and expressivist readings of religious discourse and confessional and non-confessional approaches to RE. Religious believers of all faiths who take the narratives, parables and theological doctrines of religious texts to be literally descriptive of natural or supernatural events are often referred to as 'fundamentalists', and educational approaches that encourage others to accept the literal truth of such texts are sometimes referred to as 'confessional'. However, a way out of the tangle of confusion that bedevils any contrast between confessional and non-confessional approaches to religious discourse and education is suggested by recent moral and social theoretical focus on the idea of narrative.
