The Disenchanted Assembly: The Consultation on Religious Observance in Scottish Schools
This article explores issues of social inclusion, social cohesion, culture and identity in education. The medium through which these themes are addressed is a critical analysis of the consultation on religious observance in Scottish schools. The consultation took place between November 2002 and March 2003, under the aegis of the Religious Observance Review Group (RORG). The written and oral submissions to the consultation were analysed by a research team based in The SCRE Centre in the Faculty of Education at the University of Glasgow. The consultation exercise generated a large number of responses — over 1,400. This is considerably in excess of the number of responses to other recent consultations, and is a measure of the level of public interest generated by the consultation. For example, the consultation exercise launched in the autumn of 2002 by the Expert Panel on School Meals generated a total of 208 responses (Lowden and Pirrie 2002).
Icarus ignored: understanding mundane spirituality through young people’s prayer
ABSTRACT A major international contribution to the applied philosophy of spirituality, this article builds on Wong’s description of ‘mundane spirituality’, exploring this through empirical research on young people’s approaches to prayer in Israel and the UK. The Icarus narrative is used as a metaphor for the apparent choice between the material, everyday, mundane and the heavenly, sacred and divine spiritual. Prayer is typically regarded as a spiritual activity if it makes the latter choice, and as inappropriate and unspiritual if too focused on the mundane. However, a more relational approach to spirituality sees the mundane not only as a possible route to the spiritual but as in itself spiritual. Mundane spirituality is evidenced from two projects on young people’s prayer, one based in Jewish religious schools in Israel, the other based in a range of schools (with and without religious foundations) in the UK. Young people describe the importance of the everyday, and in particular of personal relationships (with the living and the dead, and the sacred and divine), in enabling spirituality through engagement with prayer or ‘prayer spaces’ in schools. The conclusions are of significance for academic research and for professional practice.
The Ebbing Tide
Church bells, however, were very much a feature of Frazer’s childhood. In the little lochside town of Helensburgh, where Daniel Frazer, the anthropologist’s father, bought an out-of-town home in the 1860s whither at weekends the Frazers would flee the Glasgow streets, the Sabbath, rigorously maintained in the Frazer household, was punctuated by pealed invitations to worship and a round of prayer, Bible-reading and the singing of hymns. “The sound of sabbath bells, even in a foreign land,” wrote Frazer at the age of seventy-nine, thinking of Spain and perhaps too of Nemi, “still touches a deep chord in my heart.”1 In later years Daniel Frazer drew in his horns and lived entirely in his little house by the Gareloch, where twice a Sunday the peals would ricochet across the lake.