Reflections on Religious Literacy: Paradox, Promise, and Politics in a Secular Age

Sometimes a conundrum creates opportunity to go back to basics. This book was inspired by productive irritation arising from a conundrum at the intersection of three worlds Van Arragon inhabits, each of which holds assumptions about religion and religious literacy. The author’s personal world, professional life as an educator in a Christian school system, and the academic world he entered after retirement all worked with ideas about religion, including what it is and its purposes in individual and collective lives. Though each assumes its ideas are true, these worlds live in creative tension with each other. Even though people are obsessed with religion in this secular age, we don’t know what to do with it, and it lives on the margins of educational respectability.
Readers can join Van Arragon on a trip to resolve key questions of this conundrum: What is religion? What are objections to religion that marginalize it in education? What is literacy? What is religious literacy, and why is it essential for students? The author argues that religion is a foundational human capacity that equips us to ask big questions of meaning and destiny fundamental to education. Religious literacy equips students to successfully navigate their worlds and their own spirit quests and is an essential component of critical thinking.

Leo Van Arragon is an independent scholar whose current academic research in the politics of religious literacy draws on his thirty-seven-year career as a professional educator, both as a teacher and a school principal. He did extensive work in curriculum development, where he specialized in the social sciences and religion, and in political advocacy on behalf of privately funded faith-based schools in Ontario.