Building on the strengths of the first edition, the second edition of the Irwin Nicomachean Ethics features a revised translation (with little editorial intervention), expanded notes (including a summary of the argument of each chapter), an expanded Introduction, and a revised glossary.

When Religious Education (RE) in England and Wales transitioned from Christian confessionalism to a multi-faith approach in the latter half of the twentieth century, the subject’s moral aims were reasserted. In this article, we explore the moral assumptions of this transformation and map some of their connections to other theological and ethical ideas. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of a rhizome, we make two novel contributions to scholarship in this regard. First, through some salient examples we show the connections (...) between the moral aims of multi-faith RE and the assumptions of Kantian moral religion. The second contribution, building on this analysis, identifies three moral justifications of multi-faith RE: universalist (founded on assumptions of moral universals across religions), vicarious (the support of a religious worldview by using other religions’ moral teachings) and instrumentalist (a moral justification based on the supposed extrinsic benefits of studying religions). We then go onto consider how these assumptions may differ from the moral commitments of the religions they appropriate, suggesting they disrupt and recombine theocentric concepts into pedagogic ones. (shrink)

Religious education (RE) is a part of the basic curriculum, and, as such, is a compulsory subject in all schools in England–including those of no religious affiliation. The relevance of character education to the mission of schools aided or controlled by the Church of England and the Catholic Church has been recognised, and is already the subject of fruitful discussion and pedagogical innovation (see CoE, 2015; Devanny, 2017). In this paper, we open up this conversation to consider RE for schools (...) of no specific religious character: non-confessional and multi-faith RE as currently mandatory in primary and secondary academies, city technology colleges, free schools and schools remaining under local authority control. It should be noted that at present, the legal entitlement for the provision of RE in the nonfaith sector is frequently ignored. For example, analysis conducted by the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE, 2018) shows that in 2016, 43.7% of secondary academies did not offer RE at Key Stage 4–a 2.1% point increase in non-compliance from the previous year. The exclusion of RE from the English baccalaureate, and the demise of the educational oversight of local authorities are commonly attributed as the cause of this crisis, which in turn, has led to a renewed debate about the subject’s curriculum (Lawton, 2017). (shrink)