There is a widely accepted consensus that religious education, together with all other school subjects, should contribute to the goals of education for sustainable development. As a result, theoretical models have been developed to profile what the specific contributions of religious education might be. However, the question whether religious education can achieve the intended goals has not yet been researched in more detail. More fundamentally, to be able to formulate realistic goals involves the clarification of students’ predispositions. In the light of these questions, the author focuses on an ecological sustainability dilemma, the so-called poplar dilemma, and asks how students react to this conflictive situation and what roles religious orientations play in their responses. Analysis of the responses of a sample of more than 1100, 14- to 16-year-old students at secondary schools in Germany and Austria led to the conclusion that over-reaching, action-changing environmental sustainability goals are probably beyond the reach of religious education as a single subject. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that ecological issues are regarded by many as religious and spiritual questions and can therefore be addressed in a focused way through religious education. The idea of religious stewardship, which implies taking responsibility and addresses both religious and non-religious students, could be particularly promising. Religious education could develop a characteristic profile as an area in which translation between different motivations for engaging in religious stewardship occurs, and where commitments to taking responsibility are sought.

This paper shows how corpus methods can be usefully employed in the field of psychology of religion in triangulation with other empirical instruments. Current international surveys mirror an on-going transformation in subjective meanings in religious discourse cumulating in the question: what do people actually mean when they describe themselves as spiritual, religious or neither? The paper presents results of a cross-cultural study with 1,886 participants in the US and Germany. The thematic goal is to explore subjective understandings by examining personal definitions of religion and spirituality. Methodologically, the study shows how the key word procedure can be used to compare the semantic profile of subjective concepts between different languages and cultures by contrasting them to standard language and by using socio-biographical context variables to build contrasting sub-corpora. To control the in-equivalence of existing reference corpora in terms of size and design a so-called reference control corpus (RCC) is introduced.

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Although previous research has addressed the relationship between religion and ecology in a variety of ways, little is known concerning how religious orientation affects concrete everyday ecological decisions, although these are centrally important for environmental education. Being interested in elucidating the preconditions of ecological learning in Biology and Religious Education in schools, the authors have developed an approach based on maximum concretion with regard to the ecological decision in which the influence of religion should be evaluated. With this goal in mind, they conducted an empirical study among secondary school students in central Western Germany (N = 815), who were confronted with an everyday ecological dilemma and asked about their reasons for evaluating this situation. The results provide insight into the potential role of German young people’s religious orientations in ecological matters and call for a decisive profiling of how cross-disciplinary education can contribute to this key question for future.

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