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Written by the Forum for Theological Exploration's Senior Director for Learning Design Patrick B. Reyes, and Senior Fellow Dori Baker, the guest editorial explores the way ten religious educators e...

This paper uses the REA 2018 Presidential Address as a case study for noticing the benefits of adopting better norms for facilitating across diversities of race, gender, class, sexual orien...

This article explores how new knowledge about the adolescent female brain lends theoretical support to narrative and contemplative practices of spiritual formation of girls. Current brain research supports the use of particular methods of religious formation for teenagers in general, and teenage girls in particular. This article suggests that spiritual practices of narrative and contemplation—particularly as they become embodied in communal spaces—hold promise to be consistent with the development of the teenage female brain. When combined with other nurturing practices, they might help shape contemporary young female leaders who are active contemplatives and contemplative activists.

This article reports the ways five leaders situated within academic institutions widened the imagination of the role of religious education. From their own contexts and evolving vocations, they led a conversation hosted by the Forum on Religious Education and Academic Institutions. As they shared challenges and opportunities they see, they also showed how their lives prototyped diverse roles for religious educators. In so doing, they create multiple pathways for others to imagine new ways of adapting the field. The author ends with her own conclusions about how robust conversations such as this—across multiple religious traditions and diverse contexts of practice—might contribute meaningfully to the vocational identities of individual religious educators and to new, adaptive networks that may express collective vocations evolving within the field.

“I believe in parables. I navigate life using stories where I find them, and I hold tight to the ones that tell me new kinds of truth.” Barbara Kingsolver The Bridge to Terebithia unfolded slowly, ...

On a recent visit to Greensboro, North Carolina, I took a guided pilgrimage through the streets of the city with a group of teenagers and adults. Beginning on the campus of North Carolina A & T Uni...

The author describes a project that illustrates the use of critical ethnography as a research methodology in religious education. The article focuses on a facet of critical ethnography known as autoethnography. Autoethnography refers to the researcher's use of portions of her own life story in an ethnographic project. It allows the researcher to interrogate her reasons for engaging in a specific field, in this case, female adolescent voice. In her research with adolescent females, the author weaves memories of her own adolescence, especially those memories of significant adult mentors who helped her come to voice. Through the use of such autobiographical narrative, the researcher acknowledges the situated nature of her observations and reveals the connections between herself and the topic under study. In keeping with significant work in the field of anthropology, the author argues that this turn toward autoethnography allows for research that engages scholarly passion, enabling the researcher to effect ch...

Girlfriend Theology is a method of religious education by which women who have found power, voice, and authority might nurture resilience in adolescent girls within faith communities. This essay relates one portion of a larger project involving ethnographic research with fifteen females. These females gathered in small groups and followed a four‐part method that began with one person telling a story from her life. This paper shares one of these ninety‐minute story sessions in which a religiously diverse group engages in God‐talk. From four such Girlfriend Theology sessions arose seven theological assertions—statements about God, humanity, and communities of faith—that sometimes affirmed and sometimes challenged traditional interpretations. These assertions reflect emancipatory theological motifs when analyzed through the lens of womanist, mujerista, and Asian‐feminist theology. This essay draws connections between the story session reported and two of the seven theological assertions of Girlfrien...