Global Citizenship, Cultural Citizenship and World Religions in Religion Education

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An examination of the reasons for studying religion and religions and the necessity for educator, student, administrative or parental involvement in the process of teaching and learning about religious diversity. In this paper, Chidester tests one possible answer to these questions: namely, citizenship, and suggests that the study of religion, religions and religious diversity can usefully be brought into conversation with recent research on new formations of citizenship.

David Chidester is a Visiting Fellow at the Social Cohesion and Integration Research Programme of the HSRC. He is Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Cape Town, Director of the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (ICRSA), and Co-Director of the International Human Rights Exchange. He is author or editor of 15 books in the study of religion, including Religions of South Africa (1992), Shots in the Streets: Violence and Religion in South Africa (1992), Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (1996), and Christianity: A Global History (2000). In the Social Cohesion and Integration Research Programme, David Chidester is developing projects on social cohesion under globalising conditions, ethical and legal challenges of human genome research, the political economy of religion, and the analysis of inter-faith initiatives in South Africa.