Blurred boundaries: Inter-religious education at the intersection of the global and the local

Abstract

          That inter-religious education must attend to the pupils’ immediate life-world and the religious context in which they are set in, is widely accepted among teachers and scholars of Religious Education. However, current contextual approaches have yet to fully assimilate the “glocal” configuration of religion in the twenty-first century. Drawing upon the day-to-day reality of inter-religious education in Berlin, this paper sets out to develop a preliminary understanding of the “new contextuality” under the impact of globalization. First it outlines a sociological framework for describing the interpenetrative simultaneity of the global and the local in contemporary multi-religious settings as well as in the life-world of young people today-with reference to Roland Robertson’s and Peter Peyer’s pioneering studies on globalization and religion. In a next step these spatial transformations are being highlighted from a cultural point of view: How do they affect the individual constructions of identity and alterity among growing ups? In engaging with current German theories of intercultural hermeneutics and education, the paper seeks tentative answers to the initial question of inter-religious education at the intersection of the global and the local. In the end an empirical research perspective is presented: The co-presence of the global and local in the symbolic worlds of contemporary young people becomes visible and empirically traceable in the individual spatial arrangements of their own rooms.