Politics of Religious Literacy

Justine Esta Ellis, DPhil (2020), University of Oxford, is an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford. Previously, she was an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) postdoctoral Leading Edge Fellow. She has published articles on religion and policy in journals, including The Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities and Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds.

• Introduction: Defining the “Religious” in Religious LiteracyFrom Secularization to the Secular BodyReligious Literacy in ContextLooking Ahead1 The Rise of Religious Literacy1Values2Content Knowledge3Skills4Critical Responses5Conclusion2 Public Sphere, Private Choice: Religious Literacy and Public Reason1Secularity 3 and Religious Voluntarism2Taking Religion Seriously3Inclusion in the Public Sphere4The Standard of Democratic Discourse5Conclusion3 Religious Literacy and Its Limits: Liberalism, Affect, and Pedagogy1“In the Service of Democracy”: Secularity, Civics, and Liberal Education2“From Head to Heart”: Affect, Autonomy, and the Materialist Shift3“The Integrity of the Teacher”: Pedagogy, Neutrality, and Secular Subjectivity4Conclusion4 Tolerance and Its Discontents: Managing Offense in Religious Literacy Discourse1“Allergic to Controversy”: Tolerance, Civility, and Religious Offence in Public Schools2“A Crisis of Civility”: Critical Reconsiderations of Tolerance and Civil Discourse3“Vigorous-Yet-Respectful Critique”: Religious Literacy’s Reframing of Tolerance Discourse4The Limits of the Law: Does Religious Literacy Step in Where the Law Ends?5“Respect Your Neighbor”: Agonistic Respect, Deep Equality, and the Self-Regulation Trap6Conclusion5 The “Post-compliance” Moment: Religious Literacy in the Workplace1Ernst & Young (EY) – Coexist House2The Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding3The “Post-compliance” Moment4Conclusion6 “Labels Can Be a Barrier”: Religious Literacy and the Question of Category1“Religion is Not a Native Category”: Critical Religion and World Religions2Nonreligion as the New Frontier of Interreligious Dialogue and the Seeming Solution of Worldviews3ConclusionConclusion: Reforming Religious LiteracyIn Search of the Secular Student BodyClassroom CritiquesTeaching the SecularAffective PedagogiesLiberal HabitsConclusionBibliographyIndex

"The Politics of Religious Literacy succeeds as a source of “fresh thinking” about education, religion, and embodiment, and it should interest anyone invested in what Ellis calls “applied religious studies” (4): the fraught ways in which academic debates get translated into policy, pedagogy, and behavior. It shows how hard it is to escape old patterns of religious and secular thinking, but also why it might still be worth trying." Full review available on:https://readingreligion.org/9789004512931/the-politics-of-religious-literacy/ - Joshua T. Parks