Earlier studies have concluded that the religious sphere is less open to creativity than are other areas of human activities. Also, it has been suggested that artistic freedom and creative expression are unwelcome in the domain of religious iconography. In the present study, we address this subject with regard to children's artistic expression of…

The popularity of "Pokémon GO" has been credited to its branding by the Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company Nintendo, the technological innovations of the game's developer Niantic, and the historical traditions of European avant-garde locative play. The author, instead, offers a different explanation that…

In the mid-Meiji period, the leading scholar Kato Hiroyuki proposed relying on religion in moral education as he was dissatisfied with the Ministry of Education's inclination towards Western ethics in their reform. Triggered by Kato's proposal, there arose an intense debate over the 'standard' for moral education in the educational circles. The…

This study empirically investigated the invisibility, or symbolic annihilation, in Japanese English education of social groups at risk of marginalization. To do so, I assembled a corpus of 3746 English teaching materials selected because they involved world social group representation and because they were disseminated through the JET Program, a…

The article reports on international student perspectives concerning transformative pedagogy through their participation in field trips organized by the Palestinian and Arabic Studies Program at Birzeit University. Students visited historic, religious, and contemporary sites including a Bedouin village, mosques, marketplaces, the site where Jesus…

Chikuro Hiroike (1866-1938) in Japan and Felix Adler (1851-1933) in the United States both founded movements as responses to what they saw as an ethical crisis produced by the forces of modernization and secularization in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Believing that traditional religious organizations were no longer capable of defending…

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) have an important presence in contemporary civil society and have gained further prominence through their repertoire of social welfare and services. This study engaged social work educators (n = 316) across nine countries to examine their perceptions of including discourses on faith and FBOs in the social work…

When preparing students for study abroad, understanding the religious dimension of the target country/culture is generally viewed as essential for cultural competency training. What is generally left unexamined is the civil religious culture that might be operative. This essay first provides an introduction to the concept as it was introduced by…

This book critiques dominant discourses and debates pertaining to cultural identity, set against the current backdrop of growing social stratification and unequal access to quality education. It addresses current discourses concerning globalisation, ideologies and the state, as well as approaches to constructing national, ethnic and religious…

The work of the Australian mission in the southern part of Korea during the first half of the twentieth century has been a relatively undeveloped subject in scholarly research. By focusing on the educational work of the mission between 1910 and 1941, this article provides an overview of how the missionaries interacted with the Japanese colonial…

This volume contains selected papers submitted to the 20th Jubilee Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES), conducted virtually in June 2022. The 20th BCES Conference theme is "Towards the Next Epoch of Education." The theme is focused on problems, discussions, changes, solutions, and…

The schooling experience is perhaps the most influential of endeavours in terms of shaping the course of student lives. Schools that can promote happiness, referred to in this report as 'happy schools', are key to ensuring better well-being, health, and achievement as well as success in future life and work. Education systems must value the unique…

This qualitative interview study investigated Japanese understandings of spirituality, religion, and The Divine. Thirteen native Japanese living in central Ohio (6 male, 7 female) answered open-ended questions about spiritual or religious activities they engaged in, motivations for engaging in them, what constitutes sacredness, why humanity and…

Discovering whether social capital endowments in modern societies have been subjected or not to a process of gradual erosion is one of the most debated topics in recent economic literature. Inaugurated by Putnam's pioneering studies, the debate on social capital trends has been recently revived by Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) contending…

This article examines the emergence of private universities in Meiji Japan (1868-1912). It begins by discussing the interrelationships of modernity projects with the emergence of state universities, and with the new state civil servants. Second, it reviews the processes through which forerunners of private universities emerged, considering…