Once again, teachers are being made into political pawns, where K-12 schools are sites of various culture wars. This chapter frames the contemporary politics of teaching as grappling with the pluralism represented in demographically diverse classrooms. Through historicizing this quest in Gunnar Myrdal’s analysis of the “American dilemma” and unifying creed as panacea, it is possible to identify the enduring social, public, and psychodynamic dimensions of an inclusive ideal. Teachers should be prepared to cultivate deep commitment to republican virtues, in principle, while destigmatizing the identity and ontology of the “other.” A credal deep pluralism can ground classroom praxis for the relational and ethical tensions that forms of difference engender in a democracy.

While Ambrose of Milan was a major actor on the ecclesiastical and political stage of late antiquity, he was also a devoted catechist and theologian. This chapter focuses on how Ambrose trained the spiritual senses of catechumens throughout Lenten and Eastern catechesis. In Lenten sermons on the patriarchs, Ambrose focused on baptism as a death to physical ways of seeing. In Holy Week sermons (On the Hexameron and Explanatio symboli), he sought to restructure catechetical knowledge by offering pro-Nicene accounts of God and creation. In mystagogical sermons (De mysteriis and De sacramentis), he gave neophytes instruction on how to perceive the spiritual meaning of the Christian rites.

Augustine’s corpus allows the observation of several interesting aspects of the interrelation between pedagogy and knowledge. In particular, he demonstrates the way in which a Platonic-informed illuminationist epistemology can be transformed by a christologically shaped view of love. Looking primarily at De catechizandis rudibus and credal sermons, this chapter examines how Augustine understood love to be the central issue for knowing God in catechesis. It also explores how debates with Manichaeism and Donatism shaped Augustine’s view of the role of catechesis.

This essay aims to show how one remarkable practitioner of vernacular scholastic literary theory, Reginald Pecock (d. c. 1361), Bishop of Chichester, deployed it to service diverse orders of worth in his works by at once upending and apparently re-accepting authorised ecclesiastical discourses, including the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed and orthodox definitions of God as creator or as infinite. Focusing especially on the theoretical category of ordinatio, it investigates how Pecock both upsets and re-accommodates such discourses in places where the articulation and control of spiritual authority in this world and the tapping of divine authority from the next were at stake. In both his rejection of standard doctrinal discourses and his (re)accommodation of them in his own new system, Reginald deploys a full repertoire of scholastic terms, practices and attitudes. Pecock’s novel and astoundingly ambitious reconfiguration of Christian knowledge and doctrine was a gargantuan programme, endeavouring to efface and outdo traditional discourses of the Church whilst at the same time taking pains palpably, even anxiously, to be equivalent or answerable to that which it would displace. Pecock, in attempting re-cognition of the familiar, ended up recognising it dissonantly within his own unfamiliar discourse.

This chapter discusses the evidence for the existence of creeds before Nicaea and the purpose for which they might have been employed. The rival accounts of the origin of the Nicene formula are compared, together with the variants in the wording and the different accounts of its origin. The biblical texts that lie behind each verse of the creed are examined, and Beatrice’s argument for a pagan origin of the term homoousios is weighed against other theories. The anathemas require particular study, since the anathema on the term ktiston (“created”) is not preserved in all sources, but is crucial to the argumentation of Athanasius, who claims that it has the authority of Eusebius. The chapter then asks how the Nicene Creed was regarded after the end of the council, and whether subsequent creedal formulations were meant to reinforce or supersede it, and how it attained the form that is now regularly employed in churches.

The chapter argues that the general right to conscientious exemption in Canada should not be interpreted to be available only to religious people. This is for several reasons. First, the general right to conscientious exemption is available under the right to freedom of conscience under s 2(a) of the Canadian Charter and s 3 of the Quebec Charter. Albeit there are only a handful of cases on this right and even though the SCC has not unequivocally delivered a judgment on this, it is clear that the existing cases hold that freedom of conscience protects non-religious conscientious beliefs. Secondly, even though the general right to conscientious exemption arising under anti-discrimination statutes appears to be a privilege of only those with religious beliefs, it has been argued that this would violate the Canadian Charter guarantee of equality rights under s 15 and freedom of conscience under s 2(a). The appropriate remedy, for most of the anti-discrimination statutes, would be to read in conscience as a protected characteristic. This would entail that, in relation to all the rules of law which guarantee the general right to conscientious exemption, the right is not a privilege of those that object on the basis of a religious belief.

Kant is critical of many of the practices of Christianity in his time. But when we appreciate the dynamic relation between rational and revealed religion as Kant conceives them, the apparent opposition becomes more questionable and raises more questions than it answers. Kant’s project in the Religion bears important affinities with the religious philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn’s philosophy of church and state and their relation involve a number of radical proposals expressive of Enlightenment religious consciousness. Mendelssohn’s concept of enlightened Judaism bears interesting comparison to Kant’s enlightened reflections on Christianity. Mendelssohn defends a form of evidentialism even more radical that Clifford’s. He also defends a conception of the freedom of religious conscience that inspires Kant’s treatment of that topic in part four of the Religion. Conscience is an important theme in Kant’s moral philosophy, which has special application to religious conscience and the freedom of conscience Kant and Mendelssohn both defend.

Sixteenth-century Protestant reformers did not reinvent the Trinity; most preserved the medieval understanding of the doctrine of God, which the church agreed upon at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and revised at the Council of Constantinople in 381. The remarkable continuity of the medieval consubstantial Trinity during the Reformation became increasingly relevant to framing standard Reformed theology as certain minds began to fancy antitrinitarianism. The consensus among the magisterial reformers was that sixteenth-century nonconformist “heretics” endangered traditional Christology and therefore the traditional Christian doctrine of God. At the inception of Protestant dogma, reforming theologians were forced to assess an old question of the utmost relevance to the church: If Christ is not human and divine – what is Christianity? Thus, putting the relation of God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit into words from a scriptural perspective occupied the reformers as it had the early church fathers. The early reformers who revisited church doctrine should have enjoyed a period of trial and error. However, in the broader Reformation context, the sixteenth-century characters, who pushed the orthodox envelope beyond tradition, had by the mid-sixteenth century compelled the reformers to exacting linguistic precision, which subsequently became a distinctive trait of Reformed theology.