ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 investigates the terms religion and religions, firstly through a brief review of their use in Kevin O’Grady’s Religious Education as a Dialogue with Difference, then in relation to examples of recent writing on the nature of religion. Rather than adopting one definition of religion, the various understandings are seen as resources for classroom enquiry, teachers helping pupils to assess them against examples of lived religion. An emphasis on multi-aspectual study of religions is reinforced; approaches which privilege propositional (or theological or philosophical) content are found in need of broadening. In an attempt to use the category of religion without essentialising religions, the chapter retains a concept of religion as a form of multi-aspectual tradition related to the sacred, but flexibly, as a point of reference rather than a final definition, though it also finds this concept hard to avoid. Religions are recognised as structurally and concretely various as well as internally diverse, and a ‘family resemblance’ model is adopted heuristically.
