“I usually just skip anything about religion because I don’t want to make any students uncomfortable.”
That honest admission—shared with Christine Gallagher, ICJS program director for teachers, by a teacher at a national social studies conference—reveals the deep discomfort many educators feel when it comes to teaching about religion. In a time of heightened public scrutiny over what goes on in the classroom, it’s often easier to avoid the topic altogether than to risk misunderstanding, offense, or controversy.
But avoidance carries its own costs. Without thoughtful engagement, students miss out on learning about one of the most influential forces in both history and contemporary society. And in skipping religion, educators forgo a powerful opportunity to help students develop empathy, civic awareness, and the ability to navigate religious diversity.
A Groundbreaking Volume Rooted in the ICJS Teachers Fellowship
Interreligious Studies and Secondary Education: Pedagogies and Practices for Living and Learning in a Religiously Plural World takes this tension seriously. Co-edited by leaders in the fields of interreligious studies and education—including Gallagher—the volume equips educators with the tools, theory, and real-world examples they need to approach religion in the classroom with confidence.
Published by Interreligious Studies Press, an imprint of the Journal of Interreligious Studies, the book brings together 17 essays from a diverse group of educators, many of whom are alumni of the ICJS Fellowship for Teachers. These educators reflect deeply on the challenges and opportunities of teaching about religion in today’s middle and high schools—both public and religiously affiliated—and offer concrete pedagogical strategies for fostering interreligious literacy both in the classroom and in extracurricular spaces .
Each chapter ends with a list of discussion questions, so that secondary school administrators, professional learning communities, teacher educators, and others can use these essays to begin conversations in their own schools.
ICJS Fellowship for Teachers: Cultivating Courage and Competence
Gallagher, who leads the ICJS Fellowship for Teachers, opens the book with her essay, Education Eradicates Ignorance. She recounts her experience directing this unique program, which supports middle and high school educators in building their own religious literacy and applying it to their teaching. The Fellowship provides a rare space for teachers to reflect on their own assumptions about religion and to develop the skills necessary to teach about religion in academically rigorous, inclusive ways.
Many of the contributors to the volume are Fellows who have participated in the program. Their essays are reflections of lived practice—navigating the complexities of teaching about religion in public schools, religiously affiliated institutions, and extracurricular settings. The following are a few of the ICJS-affiliated contributors in the book:
- Brendan O’Kane writes about his experience as an administrator at Loyola Blakefield High School and how he came to recognize why it is important for religious schools like his to commit to interreligious dialogue and learning.
- Eleni Lampadarios, a history teacher at Friends School of Baltimore, reflects on the notion of “holy envy” as she came to appreciate religious traditions outside her own Orthodox Christianity.
- Travis Henschen, also an educator at Friends School, writes about his own religious identity as a “religious none” in religious schools, how these schools’ religious identities have helped him better define his values, and how that has helped him relate to his students.
- Chase de Saint-Felix, who participated in the Teachers Fellowship while teaching at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, shares how his experience led him to embrace two rules in his religion classroom. The first: if you begin a sentence with “This religion believes…,” assume the sentence ends with “except for all the practitioners who don’t.” The second: “No one is ever wrong about their religion and their faith.”
- Kathleen St. Villier Hill, an alumna of the ICJS Fellowship for Nonprofit and Civic Professionals, focuses on her work with the Elijah Cummings Youth Program, a leadership initiative for high school students—Black and Jewish youth—from the late congressman’s district in Baltimore.
While the contributors come from varied backgrounds and teaching contexts, they share a commitment to a vision of interreligious education that is grounded in the academic study of religion—not in advocacy or devotion. This approach, as outlined by institutions like the American Academy of Religion and the National Council for the Social Studies, emphasizes analysis, context, and inquiry over belief or practice.
Reimagining the Role of Religion in Schools
The volume concludes with an afterword by Heather Miller Rubens, Executive Director and Roman Catholic Scholar at ICJS, in which she observes that the essays highlight the diverse ways educators are reimagining religion’s role in the classroom. She notes that a century after the Scopes Monkey Trial brought public debate over religion in schools into the national spotlight, teachers still face significant external pressures and public scrutiny.
“But as this volume shows,” she writes, “teachers are creatively reimagining the role of religion in the classroom in ways that take account of religious and moral diversity. We need to ask more teachers the question: ‘What is your relationship to religion, and how does it impact your teaching?’ And then we need to listen carefully to their answers.”