Introduction: Religion’s Influence in Non-Formal and Informal Educational Contexts

This Special Issue of Religions, entitled “Examining Religion’s Influence in Non-Formal and Informal Educational Contexts: Beliefs, Practices and Narratives”, originates from the recognition that learning increasingly occurs outside formal institutions. In contemporary societies, the notion of a learning society (Ra et al. 2021) has reshaped the boundaries of education, highlighting how knowledge, values, and skills are continuously developed across the course of life and within a plurality of social environments. Within this broader transformation, religion continues to play a formative role in shaping experiences of meaning-making, belonging, and imagination.

The contributions gathered in this volume respond to an urgent need to understand how religion operates in non-formal contexts—such as cultural associations, sports clubs, religious communities, and voluntary organizations—and in informal ones, including families, friendship networks, and workplaces. Following Ammerman’s (2021) perspective on lived religion, this Special Issue emphasizes that religious learning often takes place in everyday life, untied from official institutions yet profoundly influential in personal and collective formation. Likewise, educational research has long shown that religious thinking develops through early and adolescent socialization, particularly within these diffused non-formal and informal environments (Goldman 2022).

By focusing on beliefs, practices, and narratives, this issue invites readers to examine how religion intersects with educational processes that are not confined to classrooms. While beliefs and practices have been extensively studied (Dinham and Francis 2015), narratives open a less explored dimension, illuminating how religion permeates cultural images, digital environments, and popular storytelling (Mangone 2022). The multidisciplinary approach reflects the editors’ intention to capture the multifaceted ways in which religion contributes to non-formal and informal education today.

Overall, this Special Issue aims to deepen scholarly understanding of religion as a dynamic, formative force in contemporary learning societies, revealing how faith, culture, and everyday practice intertwine to form both individual lives and broader civic horizons. There is a specific role that religion plays in the field of education (Arweck and Jackson 2014), making an important contribution to defining those horizons of meaning that allow every human being to develop a life project (Tayob 2020). Every growing person encounters various kinds of narratives (religious and otherwise) that carry value frameworks and possible worlds, through which they can gradually shape their own narrative identity (Ricoeur 1984, 1988)—that is, decide how to write their own story.

It occurs that the specific contributions offered by educational and pedagogical disciplines make it possible to develop a critical reflection that does not merely analyze what happens, but questions the educational strategies and logics that seem most appropriate to today’s cultural contexts. The issue of the epistemological identity of a pedagogy of religious experience has become particularly lively in recent years within the Italian academic debate (Caputo 2024), which has provided the integrative background for the contributions of various authors. The choice to compare the educational and formative potential of biblical narratives and fantasy narratives—as will be seen in some of the following articles—is closely related to considerations within the field of social pedagogy (Porcarelli 2021).

The ten contributions collected in this Special Issue reveal the multiple ways in which religion acts as an influential agency within non-formal and informal educational settings. Drawing on diverse disciplinary perspectives—including history, sociology, education, and philosophy—the authors explore how religious experiences, practices, and narratives shape processes of learning, moral development, and cultural mediation beyond institutional frameworks. Together, these studies show that religion remains a vital source of social education and ethical imagination across different societies. The empirical range of the volume is particularly wide, encompassing case studies from Austria, Brazil, China, Italy, and Turkey. This geographical diversity allows for a comparative understanding of how religion interacts with local traditions, cultures, and educational heritage. Despite their differences, all the contributions point to a shared assumption—education is not confined to schools or formal curricula but unfolds within everyday life, where religion continues to provide meaning, belonging, and interpretive frameworks for social action.

The first set of contributions examines how religion operates as a formative presence in collective and institutional settings. Parish Futsal: A Technical–Educational or Pastoral Challenge? explores the intersection between sports and parish life in Rome, showing that futsal teams affiliated with the Centro Sportivo Italiano can serve as spaces of moral learning and community building, though often loosely connected to formal pastoral aims. A similar emphasis on community emerges in “I Learnt Much About…” the Impact of Cooperative Interreligious Education, which analyses Austria’s apprenticeship schools to assess the effects of co-operative religious education. While cognitive knowledge about other faiths remains limited, participants develop empathy, self-awareness, and interreligious understanding—key aspects of civic learning in plural societies. Complementing these perspectives, Bible Narratives and Youth Religious Identity draws on quantitative data from Italian youth, revealing that even minimal familiarity with biblical stories nurtures diverse interpretive frameworks across religious, agnostic, and atheist subgroups, thereby linking narrative imagination to moral identity formation.

A second cluster of studies engages the historical and biographical dimensions of religious learning. Religious Education in Baden-Powell’s Writings revisits the spiritual foundations of Scouting, emphasizing how nature, discipline, and transcendence were integrated into Baden-Powell’s vision of moral education—a notion of faith as experiential learning that anticipated later holistic pedagogies. Female Religiosity in Self-Narration approaches faith through autobiographical accounts by Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim women, illustrating how early religious education continues to inform adult identity, motherhood, and interreligious empathy. In Changes and New Religious Orientations Among Practicing Catholics?, large-scale survey data from Italy highlight shifting forms of lived religiosity: believers express individualized spiritualities and pragmatic moral orientations, mirroring the adaptive transformations of Catholicism within learning society. These three articles, taken together, reveal how religious experience evolves across life trajectories and historical contexts, remaining a resource for meaning-making, gendered identity, educational outcomes, and ethical self-formation.

The final group of contributions explores religion’s educational impact in hybrid, exceptional, and intercultural societal environments. Educational Functions of Biblical Narratives investigates how young people use biblical and fantasy stories to structure personal identity, showing that sacred texts continue to provide ethical and emotional guidance even outside institutional religion. The Influence of Spirituality on the Education of Incarcerated Individuals examines Brazil’s APAC model of police-free prisons, where spirituality supports rehabilitation by cultivating responsibility, empathy, and purpose—an alternative pedagogy grounded in human dignity and liberation. Relationship Between Secularization and the Level of Perceiving Religious Influence Among Individuals Receiving Higher Religious Education surveys theology students in Türkiye, highlighting generational tensions between modern secular values and persistent faith commitments. Finally, Between Confucianism and Christianity: Epistemological and Syncretic Challenges in Constructing a Chinese Catholic Educational Discourse offers a philosophical reading of Chinese Catholic pedagogy, proposing a dialogical synthesis between Confucian virtue ethics and Christian personalism.

Collectively, these studies trace the diverse ways religion continues to shape moral, cultural, and civic learning across distinct social and cultural contexts. The ten contributions collected in this Special Issue portray religion as a multidimensional educational force operating beyond institutional frameworks. Across different contexts and traditions, they demonstrate that learning through religion is primarily an experiential, relational, transformative, and even narrative process that engages the moral and imaginative dimensions of human development. Religion emerges here not as a subject to be taught but as a social pedagogy (Porcarelli 2021)—a set of practices and narratives that cultivate reflection, empathy, and civic responsibility.

A first transversal theme concerns religion as experiential learning. In several studies, learning unfolds through embodied participation rather than formal instruction. The re-search on parish futsal in Rome illustrates how sport becomes a vehicle for moral and communal education, while the Austrian case on cooperative interreligious education shows how encounter and dialogue foster mutual understanding and self-awareness. Such findings point toward a constructivist conception of learning: knowledge grows from experience, interaction, and shared practice. A second theme, focusing on narrative and imagination, connects studies that investigate how biblical stories, autobiographical accounts, and popular narratives shape identity, as well as moral and ethical sensibility. From the exploration of biblical narratives among Italian youth to the life stories of women from different faiths, storytelling emerges as a pedagogical tool that allows individuals to make sense of their experiences and articulate values across cultural boundaries.

A third interpretative line highlights intergenerational and communal education. Family environments, parishes, youth groups, and rehabilitation communities appear as informal spaces of moral development and everyday education. The Brazilian study on spirituality in prisons demonstrates how care, responsibility, and faith can reshape human relations and foster learning in extreme contexts. Likewise, research on contemporary Catholicism shows that even amid growing individualization, communal belonging remains a vital pedagogical resource. Finally, the theme of hybridity and cultural change—particularly within the domain of education and social pedagogy—emerges in the contributions from Turkey and China, both examining the interplay between religious and secular systems of thought. These works illustrate how educational processes can mediate between tradition and modernity, integrating critical thinking and intercultural sensitivity. Religion thus contributes to a broader redefinition of education as a dynamic negotiation among worldviews rather than a static transmission of doctrines.

Overall, these findings invite a renewed understanding of religion’s educational significance in contemporary societies. The articles gathered in this Special Issue reveal that non-formal and informal contexts—sports, families, media, prisons, and intercultural dialogue venues—are vibrant laboratories of learning, where crucial features such as encounter, empathy, and awareness are continuously cultivated.