PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACTS - Università degli Studi di Messina

Jaco Beyers, University of Pretoria, South Africa
What is Religion? An African Understanding
Western thought has influenced the way of understanding religion. Western philosophy
supported the separation between the sacred and profane. Modernism focusing on the thinking
man, reduced religion to a set of correctly formulated dogmas and doctrines. Western thought,
dominated by Christianity, created through a theology of religions a hierarchical structure of
world religions. This study is not an attempt to add a new definition of what religion is. There
is no single theoretical perspective on what religion is. The study of religion is concerned with
a variety of different phenomena all grouped together under the heading of religion. Religion is
not the sum of all its parts, neither the reduction to one element. Such functional and
substantial definitions have proved to be insufficient. Some scholars have even suggested that
the term religion be abandoned. Can an African understanding of religion make a contribution
to the understanding of what religion is? Such a question requires an African understanding of
religion as well as an understanding of African religion. Religion from an African perspective
puts emphasis on the human effort to systematize in society the continuation of a central
religious experience. Tradition expressed in rituals and ethics, become the social expressions of
these religious experiences. The moment when the concept of religion is fixed in African
society, there is no separation between transcendental and immanent reality. The social and
religious spheres become one. African scholars do not present one unified understanding of
religion. Some scholars would even argue that an African understanding is nothing more than
an internalized form of Western perspectives. To characterize Traditional African Religion as a
type of religion minimizes the contribution that an African understanding can have on religion.
Perhaps for some, African thought does not present any new insights into what religion is, but
it reminds us of important aspects of religion long been forgotten.
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Tue 15 th , 16.00, Classroom 13
Cristofer Bochinger, University of Bayreuth, Bavaria - Katharina Frank, University of
Zürich, Switzerland
Religion and Values in German Speaking Textbooks
Religious Education is very often expected to convey to the pupils not only knowledge about
“religion” or “religions”, but also ethical norms and values. In this paper, we will analyse how
“values” are transmitted in different textbooks. The paper starts from two observations: First,
teachers tend to rely much more on textbooks than on syllabuses and curricula (which they
often do not even know) while preparing their classes. Second, it can be stated that they often
use textbooks from different origins (e.g. Suisse or German, confessional or non-confessional),
even when they are supplied with official teaching material by their respective school
authorities (e.g. in the Suisse cantons). Therefore, it is an important question, how the relation
between “religion” and “values” is presented in the textbooks. In our paper, we will compare
textbooks dedicated to different models of religious education or religion education
(confessional and non-confessional): Which kinds of “values” are regarded as important for the
pupils? Are there typical differences related to the different models of education? What can be
concluded for the composition of textbooks for non-confessional religion education?
Tue 15 th , 9.40, Classroom 4