The Community of Philosophical Inquiry and Religious Education: A Pragmatist Perspective

In the present paper, I will address the question of religious education in a multi-religious but also, in other respects, post-religious society through a philosophical-educational lens and, more specifically, in reference to the tradition of educational pragmatism. I will first show how far the issue of religious education disappears in the reflections of John Dewey or, rather, it is transmogrified into the endeavor to think of forms of a deeper and fuller religion adequate for the modern age. In this horizon, classic religious education is replaced by education for a recognition of the spiritual import of science and democracy. Against this backdrop, a specific contemporary inflection of Dewey’s pedagogy is investigated, namely the community of philosophical inquiry elaborated by Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp, and its value as an educational setting for a kind of religious education living up to present-day demands will be explored. In particular, I will focus on Sharp’s creative recontextualization of Dewey’s tenets in philosophy of religion and on her ambitious argumentation in favor of the ‘sacred’ character of the community of philosophical inquiry and of its significance as a pedagogical approach that may be conducive to the invention of new metaphors to make sense of the spiritual experience also in the formative years of children.