ABSTRACT
For me, as for many religious education teachers in Britain, an awareness of the problems presented by religious education grew out of the daily responsibility for the planning and conduct of the assemblies in the London boys school where I was teaching in the mid-1960s. What should the place of religion be in schools today? What inner connection, if any, might there be between education in religion and divine worship? How could a reconciliation be affected between the critical, analytic and descriptive demands of education and the nature of the spiritual life? I had already faced this latter question as a theological student at Cambridge in my personal life, and my experience of teaching religion in school forced me to encounter the same question in a wider professional context. It is, therefore, appropriate that this collection should begin with the two articles on school worship which formed the seeds of what was to become my 1975 book School Worship: An Obituary.
