Opinion

Robert Beckford is Professor of Religion and Culture in the African Diaspora in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University in
Canterbury, Kent, and Visiting Professor...

Samira Ahmed is a BBC journalist and broadcaster, and presenter of The World Tonight and Front Row. She was a member of the Commission on RE that reported in 2018. REtoday asked her to reflect on some questions of...

Comedian Russell Brand, interviewed by Paul Northrop at the Greenbelt Festival, gives a vivid account of his views on spiritual life, addiction, philosophy and more. Use it with your senior students to provoke a...

Cat Stevens grew from being a teen idol of the 1960s into one of the most influential singer-songwriters of his time. In addition to his vast musical achievements, his lifelong spiritual quest has added intrigue and...

Professor Robin Veldman is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar. Her research examines how religious beliefs and cultural identity shape attitudes toward nature. With methodologies from religious studies...

Dr Laura D’Olimpio, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at the University of Birmingham, argues for a broad-based moral investigation of climate change issues in RE. Laura edits the Journal of Philosophy in...

Dr John Bimson was a tutor in Old Testament Studies at Trinity College Bristol. He argues that the Book of Job provides a resource for reflection on reasons why it may be unwise to take an anthropocentric view of our...

It is easy for us educationalists to fetishise books. In and out of our conscious lives, books get everywhere: books for marking, books for research, books to write and – I hope – books for simple recreation. Since...

Stephen T. Asma offers a vision of a role for religion from a perspective of psychological health. ‘The Indian elephant is known sometimes to weep,’ Charles Darwin wrote Charles Darwin in 1872. ‘In the Zoological...

It used to be prophets who had visions. Nowadays, vision means a little less. When we are asked what our ‘vision’ is for RE, we know that we are supposed to say what our intention is when teaching the subject. In...

In this interview Professor Richard Swinburne defends his cumulative argument for the existence of God. We sourced some questions from A-level RS students and are so grateful to Richard for his profound engagement with...

It was amazing in the summer that tens of thousands of young poets from hundreds of schools entered our Spirited Poetry competition. NATRE felt that in order to properly judge the poems we needed a ‘real poet’ on...

Professor Alec Ryrie presented the Gresham Lectures. Here he explores some issues about the representation of religion in the UK for the benefit of teachers of RE.

Kathryn Wright has been appointed CEO for the Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, a major national sponsor and grant maker in the field of RE. We wanted to ask her about her life in RE.

Mark Quinn and Mark Evans September 2019 saw the introduction of Ofsted’s new Education Inspection Framework (EIF). This focuses on the real substance of education: the curriculum. Through its ‘quality of...

Lat Blaylock commends a new resource for RE from one of our great institutions of cultural capital, the British Library. If inspectors want to see a rich knowledge curriculum, and pupils deserve to explore sources of...

I made an uncritical start. I was a third-generation priest. I went to a Church of England primary school before starting at the age of 10 at a religious foundation public school. The given was that everything to do with...

What did broadcaster and atheist Melvyn Bragg mean last year when he announced that it’s a disgrace that children don’t read the Bible anymore? He was, of course, talking about reading the 1611 King James Version! I...

do these words always mean the same? Suhaiymah is in her 20s. A third-generation Pakistani Muslim born in Bradford and schooled in Leeds, she studied History at Cambridge University and Postcolonial Studies at SOAS. She...

Professor David Wilkinson of the University of Durham shares a perspective on the difference between you, dear reader, and a cauliflower.