What Kind of Deconstruction for Deconstructive Religious Education? Response to Noaparast and Khosravi

Abstract

First paragraph: The question whether the writings of Jacques Derrida have anything to offer for religious education is, in our opinion, a very important one. It is also a tremendously difficult question to engage with, not only because it requires philosophical, theological, and educational argumentation, but also because it requires argumentation that is sufficiently consistent across these domains. In our own attempts at answering the question (see particularly Miedema and Biesta 2004; Biesta and Egea-Kuehne 2001; Peters and Biesta 2009) we have tried to argue that the writings of Derrida provide openings that speak to both theology and education in a way that is not only significant for each domain separately, but that actually "crosses" the two domains. This makes the work of Derrida of particular interest for the field of religious education.