This book offers an account of religious schooling committed to ‘queer-thriving’ and envisions how queer staff and students can live their lives without being ‘accommodated’ within heteronormative religious traditions. Engaging with queer theological perspectives across the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, the book begins by situating queer thriving as a viable part of the work of the religious school, and not just as something reserved for progressive education more broadly. Taking three areas that are typically used to justify religious heteronormativity (religious texts, religious values, religious rituals), it engages queer theologies to showcase how an educational approach committed to queer thriving can be enacted in religious schools in ways that are also theologically sensitive. The book then explores how religious school communities can navigate differences around queerness and religion in ways that are supportive of queer staff and students. It takes desire as an everyday reality in classrooms and applies a queer lens to this to challenge heteronormativity and to imagine alternative modes of relationship between staff, students, and communities that enable queer staff and students to thrive. Showcasing possibilities of resistance for the opposition between religious and queer concerns, it will appeal to researchers, postgraduates and academics in the fields of religion and education, whilst also benefitting those working across philosophy of education and educational theory, sex education, sociology of education, social justice education, queer theologies, religious studies, and sociology of religion.

Since 2007, a Catholic LGBTQ+ organization called New Ways Ministry has documented over 60 cases of LGBTQ+ educators and allies who have been fired from Catholic schools throughout the US. The firings are met with significant local and national public outcry, resulting in fragmented, polarized, and wounded Catholic school communities throughout the nation. Who are these educators? Why are they fired? And is there a better way to respond to the presence of LGBTQ+ employees (as well as students and families) in Catholic education? Dr. Ish Ruiz responds to this controversy with a new theological framework, based on Pope Francis’s vision for a synodal Church, that will aid Catholic schools in an effort to include LGBTQ+ educators while remaining faithful to the Catholic tradition. His framework offers a multifaceted approach to this issue by examining the fields of pastoral ministry, sexual morality, ecclesiology, and Catholic social teaching to craft an inclusive synodal vision for Catholic education. More importantly, Ruiz answers Pope Francis’s calls for a Church that listens by lifting up the stories of LGBTQ+ educators and their invaluable contributions to Catholic schools. This book calls upon Catholic school leaders (including bishops, diocesan officials, school administrators, and other stakeholders) to treat LGBTQ+ educators with compassionate justice and to foster a school environment where all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, can feel respected, welcomed, and cherished as beings made in the Image of God.

Because spiritual life and religious participation are widespread human and cultural phenomena, these experiences unsurprisingly find their way into English language arts curriculum, learning, teaching, and teacher education work. Yet many public school literacy teachers and secondary teacher educators feel unsure how to engage religious and spiritual topics and responses in their classrooms. This volume responds to this challenge with an in-depth exploration of diverse experiences and perspectives on Christianity within American education. Authors not only examine how Christianity – the historically dominant religion in American society – shapes languaging and literacies in schooling and other educational spaces, but they also imagine how these relations might be reconfigured. From curricula to classroom practice, from narratives of teacher education to youth coming-to-faith, chapters vivify how spiritual lives, beliefs, practices, communities, and religious traditions interact with linguistic and literate practices and pedagogies. In relating legacies of Christian languaging and literacies to urgent issues including White supremacy, sexism and homophobia, and the politics of exclusion, the volume enacts and invites inclusive relational configurations within and across the myriad American Christian sub-cultures coming to bear on English language arts curriculum, teaching, and learning. This courageous collection contributes to an emerging scholarly literature at the intersection of language and literacy teaching and learning, religious literacy, curriculum studies, teacher education, and youth studies. It will speak to teacher educators, scholars, secondary school teachers, and graduate and postgraduate students, among others.

This novel and contemporary anthology brings important topics about race, religion, and identity to the foreground to address the challenges facing Muslim schoolchildren today. Through interviews and case studies, the chapters explore topics such as multiethnic education, teacher diversity, and culturally responsive pedagogy, providing insights into necessary changes and ways to enhance schools. Taking into account cultural touchstones such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the Trojan Horse affair, the book argues for an urgent, transformative accommodation of Muslims to take place within schooling in order to improve the educational standards of Muslim children within the United Kingdom, including several chapters that focus on Muslim education in locations such as Yorkshire, Peterborough, High Wycombe, and Tower Hamlets, and further afield. This book will be of importance to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students studying religious education, secondary education, and multicultural education more broadly. Policymakers interested in education policy and politics, as well as race and ethnicity in educational contexts, may potentially benefit from the volume.

This book provides insights into new developments and persistent traditions in Zen teacher training and education through the use of historical archival research and original interviews with living Zen Masters. It argues that some contemporary Euro-American social values of gender equality, non-discrimination, rationality, ecumenicism and democracy permeate not only the organizational aspects of the Kwan Um School of Zen case study, but soteriological processes and goals of the training more widely. Each chapter showcases the ways important facets of Zen education—from meditation to curriculum development to school management — have absorbed Euro-American cultural and social ideals in both community and educational practices. Giving dedicated scholarly attention and conceptualising new adaptations in transnational Zen communities, it constitutes an important and timely addition to the literature and will appeal to researchers and scholars of religion and education, Asian pedagogies, contemporary Buddhism, transnational Zen, and Zen education.

**Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award**

Drawing on research conducted at 17 Catholic universities in the United States, making it the largest study of its kind, this volume explores effective practice in improving institutional policy relating to issues of sexuality. The text calls attention to campus cultures of fear, shame, or denial around sexuality and highlights possible points of institutional resistance to changes in policy. Discussing topics such as sexual identity, sexuality education in the curriculum, Title IX, employee termination, and morality clauses, the book shows how staff and faculty are crucial in effecting change across Catholic campuses, providing valuable insight into the “unspoken rules” around sexuality within the shadow culture at Catholic institutions. Moreover, the text illustrates how institutions can maintain fidelity to Church teachings and even embrace notions of human dignity, solidarity, and the common good to achieve sexual inclusivity. A unique study demonstrating how Catholic teaching can help support inclusive change around issues of sexuality and gender in higher education, it ultimately puts forward a practical framework for effecting change and improving student and staff support structures in Catholic institutions. It will thus appeal to researchers and academics working in the fields of Higher Education Management, Gender and Sexuality in Education, Religion, Gender and Sexuality, and the Sociology of Religion.

Gender and Pop Culture examines the intersection of media, society, gender, and culture through a multi-disciplinary lens. The book serves both as a text and reader, focused on an examination of gender and society.

Despite similar vulnerability to mental illness as the general population, adults within the Latinx community often do not receive treatment for severe mental illnesses. Latinx communities face health disparities and lack of access to mental healthcare due to language barriers, lack of health insurance coverage, lack of cultural competence from healthcare practitioners, and more. It is essential to promote positive mental health practices within the Latinx community and to educate healthcare practitioners in cultural competence. Latinx Mental Health: From Surviving to Thriving focuses on the research and practical experiences that foster cultural resilience and strength. Rather than advocating for an assimilative model of coping, this book focuses on the way that Latinx issues can be studied and addressed in a culturally and linguistically appropriate way. This publication seeks to inspire a new generation of mental health researchers and practitioners to engage with the Latinx population in a strength-based way. Covering topics such as LGBTQ+ Latinxs, health disparities, and intergenerational trauma, this premier reference work is an excellent resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, sociologists, government officials, healthcare professionals, students and faculty of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.