If you have any questions, please contact Alex Damm (adamm@wlu.ca). We shall get back to you quickly and want to help you to attend the conference. For further registration information, please visit the homepage of the Department of Religion and Culture (www.wlu.ca/religionandculture).

Below you will find the call for papers. If interested, please contact Alex at the email address above.

March 8 and 9, 2012, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON

Call for Papers

While much public attention has recently focused on the role of religious schooling in Ontario, there has been far less attention to the role, or lack of role, that the academic study of religions plays in Ontario’s public education. How does religious studies currently figure within the province’s public and Roman Catholic school systems? How should it figure within these systems? Is the study of religions adequately encouraged in public education, and if so, at what levels? How can we engage the study of religions in ways that inform our understanding of other fields of inquiry? And what makes for effective school education in the study of religions? These are some of the questions that we seek to address at the 2012 Religion in Public Life conference: Religious Literacy and Public Education in Ontario.

This call for papers is to solicit papers from faculty (and students) who are fascinated by such questions and who can help us interpret this complex and timely topic. Paper presentations will ideally be approximately 25 minutes long. If interested, please submit a 150-word abstract to Alex Damm (adamm@wlu.ca). The deadline for submission of abstracts is February 1, 2012. We look forward to hearing from you.