This paper discusses citizenship in Finnish religious education in relation to human security. It traces the characteristics of human security that connect citizenship, religion, and education in Finnish policy documents. The article focuses on basic education. Its data were analyzed employing qualitative content analysis. The findings indicate that citizenship in Finnish RE entails personal security concerns dealing with psychological and human rights issues. These are found to be essentially human security as conceptualized by the United Nations. However, Finnish policy documents (...) sparingly utilize human security in explicit terms. Finland rather emphasizes the practical applications of human security. Incorporation of explicit global citizen and human rights issues into RE in the new Finnish curriculum seems to project critical global citizenship. This is found to promote human security. Following Finland’s bid for practical application of human security, we recommend that human security be explicitly integrated into the Finnish RE curriculum. (shrink)

The word 'paradigm' appears in a number of Cornelia Roux's published works (Roux 1998; 1998a; 2003; 2008; 2009; 2011). This article re-examines her use of 'paradigm' in the light of Thomas Kuhn's (1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on recently published work on religion and education (Gearon 2013; 2014), I elaborate why researchers and educators alike require a more rigorous theoretical conceptualisation of the underlying paradigms of contemporary religious education. Outlining how a satisfactory understanding of the paradigms in religious (...) education require an understanding of the epistemological grounds of each, the article presents, by way of demonstration, a critical outline of six such paradigms: the scriptural-theological; the phenomenological; the spiritual-experiential; the philosophical-conceptual; the socio-cultural; and the historical-political. (shrink)