Interreligious Education: Transnational and Trans-Spiritual Identity Formation in the Classroom

Abstract

This chapter engages with ways interreligious and intercultural pedagogies might honor and make visible the religious and cultural diversity present in classrooms by co-cultivating new forms of trans-spiritualities and nurturing a commitment to mutual transformation. It examines how minoritized people and communities carry porous boundaries across space, time, and lands, creating new practices, customs, and lexicons, while simultaneously struggling with the impact of internalized cultural and religious hybridity. The chapter discusses the dangers of white and Christian supremacist understandings of non-white and non-Christian communities, and the resistance of such supremacism to any naturally hybrid and dynamic representations of culture and religion in the intercultural and interreligious classroom.