REA Annual Meeting

The meeting was held in November of 2010. Thanks for being a part of it!

The Religious Education Association is an incorporation of the venerable 100 year old association (REA) of persons who have gathered semi-annually, published and taught religious education during this past century and the Association of Professors and Researchers in Religious Education (APRRE), the group of professors, scholars and researchers who for the past 30 years have gathered annually as a guild of scholars building and sharing a body of theory and research.

In the flow

Our theme for the 2010 annual meeting is “In the flow: Learning religion and religiously learning amongst global cultural flows.”

What does religious education look like — and what could it look like — in a world of global cultural flows? What kind of religious identity ought we be educating for in a world in which some forms of religious identity produce painfully stark conflict? How do we understand religious traditions in the midst of global political shifts? What kinds of learning community are needed for a mission of providing room and voice for spirit in a world of globalization?

These — and more — will be the questions we engage for three days together in Denver, Colorado. This year’s schedule is crammed full of compelling presentations, and our speaker list draws from a rich variety of traditions and locations. We hope you will not only choose to come yourself, but will make a special effort to invite people who may not have joined us in a couple of years, or who do not yet realize how the work they’re doing is congruent with these questions.

A new year, a new format

As our organization continues to grow into the future, we are mindful of the need to meet an ever more diverse set of participant needs. This year we’ve put the schedule together in a way that will allow people who are new to the field, or just dipping into the research, to come for Sunday and Monday (with the banquet honoring Parker Palmer taking place on Monday evening), and we are reserving Tuesday as an intense day of focus on the future of our field of religious education. Note that we are asking people who are deeply involved in the field to make a commitment to stay for the entire meeting — which will conclude in the afternoon of Tuesday, Nov. 9th. Please pay special attention to the schedule, so that you can plan accordingly.

We have also added a new plenary of “lightning talks” (see below for details), and the Peace and Justice Task Force is sponsoring a day-long workshop on digital storytelling prior the meeting’s opening on Saturday, November 6th.

We’ve continued to build on the fine work of our outgoing President, Maureen O’Brien, by rebuilding our digital resources. You can follow the conference updates on our conference blog, and there will be people present during the meeting who will actively be posting to that blog, and to the wider public sphere using Twitter. (Incidentally, if you’d like to be active in that element of this meeting, please contact Mary Hess.)

Global religious flows are impacting our field — and we hope to have a presence in those flows. We look forward to your joining us in Denver in November!

REA Mission

The mission of the Religious Education Association is to create opportunities for exploring and advancing the interconnected practices of scholarship, research, teaching, and leadership in faith communities, academic institutions, and the wider world community. The Association accomplishes its mission in four ways:

• Through sharing, critiquing and encouraging publication of substantive research, probing scholarship and practical approaches to religious education (particularly through its journal Religious Education);
• Through ecumenical, inter-religious, and cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and inter-professional dialogue that stimulates members to recall and examine historic traditions and explore fresh visions of religious education for the diverse and ever-changing human family in our complex world community;
• Through creation of international networks of communication, cooperation and support in order to strengthen leaders in religious education, and religious education as a distinctive and vital field; and
• Through interpreting the nature, purposes, and value of the field of religious education to the wider society and those preparing to become professors, researchers, or other leaders in religious education.