February « 2012 « Religious Literacy Leadership in Higher Education

New event - facilitated learning set

By Matthew Francis, on February 29th, 2012

On May 3rd we will be running a facilitated learning set. This event will be an opportunity for people who have previously attended one of our religious literacy workshops to talk about their experiences of religious literacy within their HEIs since their participation in the programme.

We offer these facilitated learning sets to all who [...]

Updated Religious Literacy resources

By Matthew Francis, on February 28th, 2012

Through our research with Higher Education Institutions we have developed a number of excellent resources for Senior Managers and staff. We have just refreshed our print resources and brought them up to date.

Use the following link to take a look:

Religious Literacy Resources

You can download these resources for free, or you [...]

University of Portsmouth - Islamic Awareness Week

By Matthew Francis, on February 27th, 2012

The Islam Society at the University of Portsmouth is running an Islamic Awareness Week from the 27th February to the 3rd of March. There will be debates about Sharia law, the existence of God and a talk from the journalist Yvonne Ridley about becoming a Muslim feminist. You can read about the week in their [...]

Dawkins: we need religious literacy

By Matthew Francis, on February 23rd, 2012

Perhaps to the surprise of some present at the second of the Westminster Faith Debates last night, the well-known atheist Professor Richard Dawkins, one of the panellists, asserted that “we need religious literacy”.

It was a common area of agreement amongst all the panellists, along with a sense that despite this need there is woeful [...]

Religious literacy in China?

By Adam Dinham, on February 10th, 2012

I joined a UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office human rights delegation to China last month. The talks, held in Nanjing, took religion and civil society as their theme. Both ideas are especially controversial in the Chinese context. Religions are subject to state regulation and in some cases, notably the Falun Gong, to persecution. Likewise civil [...]

Restoring religion to the public square

By Matthew Francis, on February 3rd, 2012

Cover image from The Tablet, 28th January, 2012

Professor Linda Woodhead, Director of the £12-million AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme has written an article for The Tablet, entitled ‘Restoring religion to the public square: faith’s role in civil society‘. In this article Woodhead describes both the secular assumptions of many academic disciplines within British [...]