The number of students from other religious traditions is increasing in Christian seminaries in the United States. However, seminaries have different motivations, visions, and rationales that determine whether and how they accept these students. The purpose of this article is to examine how seminaries approach this matter and what issues follow. The author suggests that the revised framework of Van der Ven and Ziebertz's models of religious education (the monoreligious, multireligious, and interreligious models) can be particularly helpful in theorizing the current context of seminaries that are becoming multireligious. This article then explores the challenges that each model encounters and finds that those challenges, or conundrums, are closely related to the tensions between values such as openness, educational justice, and institutional identity.
In the late twentieth century, interreligious education emerged as a way to transform one’s attitude toward other religions and reduce religious prejudice. This article addresses the philosophical aspects of this practice, in particular the problems that arise when an essentialist approach is accommodated. The problems include the why (philosophical rationale), the who (subject and participant), the what (content), and the future (purpose). In response, the author explores how a relational approach grounded in a Whiteheadian philosophy of multiplicity would allow us to understand interreligious education differently. The article finds that a relational approach can help us imagine and embody interreligious education in a more humanizing, inclusive, and transformative way.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.