Can pedagogy of religion be secularized? On orthodoxy, heresy, and the prospects of disciplinary development from the point of view of critical religious studies

Abstract

Reconstructing semantic and functional contexts of using categories of orthodoxy and heresy in selected sociological concepts allows to build and include their theoriotic potential in the field of general pedagogy and pedagogy of religion. The pedagogy of religion in Poland is usually reserved for pedagogical-theological thinking within the Christian tradition. This type of approach resonates strongly with the classical theories of religious studies situating itself in the current of the so-called. It does not, however, seem to exhaust the spectrum of possibilities offered to the pedagogy of religion by contemporary critical religious studies, which no longer links the problems of religion so closely with the problems of theology. On the contrary, it detaches the phenomenon of religion from theology, "secularizes" it, which results in an extraordinary diversity of theories of religion, often linking them with such "non-religious" subjects as ecologies, ideologies, sports or urban movements. In this paper, starting from the presentation of selected findings from my own research on the categories of orthodoxy and heresy, I will try to outline this underestimated by the pedagogy of religion, inspired by critical religious studies, theoretical potential for its development.