Religious education: robust and bold for a multifaith era

The events of September 11, 2001 are just a few of the many that, as well as summoning a new era globally, offer a stark challenge for religious education as an area of school and post-school study. While these events, when fully understood, should probably not be interpreted in overly religious terms, they were nonetheless taken up popularly in those terms. Why else would characters with the politics of John Howard and George Bush have, in each case, paid their first visit to a mosque within weeks of the events, and been so fulsome in their praise of Islam and the vital contribution it continues to play in the social histories of their two nations?