A Dialogical Epistemology for Catholic Religious Education: Disciplinary Identity and Educational Openness in Plural Societies

Abstract

Growing religious and cultural pluralism has placed dialogue at the centre of the international debate on Religious Education (RE). Contemporary scholarship has emphasised its importance for the study of religions, personal development, freedom of conscience, democratic citizenship, and intercultural coexistence. Less attention has been paid to the relationship between the dialogical quality of RE and the epistemological structure of the school subject itself. This concept paper develops a theoretical and foundational argument through focused critical analysis of scholarship in Religious Education, curriculum theory, sociology of religion, and relevant theological and magisterial sources. Catholic Religious Education in Italy (Insegnamento della Religione Cattolica, IRC) serves as a conceptual laboratory for examining epistemological and pedagogical identity. The article interprets theology as the scientia rectrix of IRC and argues that the Christian understanding of Revelation as relational, dialogue with culture and the sciences, and recognition of religious otherness give the subject an intrinsically dialogical epistemological structure. Through pedagogical mediation, this structure gives rise to three educational implications: identity formation, anthropological openness, and hospitality as the pedagogical form of dialogicality. The Italian case offers a theoretical lens for reconsidering the relationship among disciplinary identity, dialogue, and pluralism across contemporary models of Religious Education.

1. Introduction

In recent decades, international reflection on Religious Education (RE) has been shaped by the religious and cultural pluralization of contemporary societies and by the renewed public visibility of religion. The revision of linear accounts of secularization has shifted attention from predictions of religion’s progressive decline toward the plural ways in which religious, secular, and non-religious convictions inhabit the same social space. Within this framework, pluralism has a specifically relational meaning: in Diana Eck’s account, it entails engagement, mutual knowledge, and the intentional construction of relationships among differences that remain recognizable (Eck 2015).

Educational debate has developed significant responses to this transformation. The study of religions has been linked to the quality of knowledge, religious literacy, personal development, human rights, democratic citizenship, and intercultural dialogue. These perspectives have helped define conditions for addressing religion in schools in ways that respect students’ freedom and respond to the complexity of plural societies. A foundational issue nevertheless remains comparatively underexplored: the relationship between the dialogical quality of a religious school subject and the epistemological structure that organises its object, methods, sources, and forms of rationality.

This essay is conceived as a theoretical and foundational concept paper. Its method is argumentative and interpretive, based on a focused critical analysis of literature selected in relation to the theoretical problem. The discussion brings into dialogue contributions from the sociology of religion on the shift from secularization to pluralism; international scholarship on RE; European documents concerning religion, rights, and intercultural education; contemporary work on the structure of school subjects and the curricular transformation of knowledge; and theological and magisterial sources relevant to Catholic understandings of Revelation, dialogue, and relations with other religions. The literature therefore serves a reconstructive and interlocutory function, supporting the formulation and discussion of a conceptual proposal.

Catholic Religious Education in Italy (Insegnamento della Religione Cattolica, IRC) is treated here as a theoretically generative case. Its configuration makes especially visible the relationship among the principal academic discipline—theology—contributions from other academic disciplines that study religion, and the pedagogical mediation proper to a school subject. The central thesis is that the dialogical character of IRC can be traced to its epistemological identity: when a theology that understands Revelation relationally and recognises dialogue with culture, the sciences, and other religious traditions is pedagogically mediated within the curriculum, it generates a corresponding educational form.

The argument unfolds through a precise conceptual sequence. The identity of a school subject comprises an epistemological and a pedagogical dimension; in IRC, theology performs the function of scientia rectrix and gives unity to contributions from different fields; the dialogical structure of this foundation guides the pedagogical transformation of the subject; and its educational implications can be described in terms of identity formation, anthropological openness, and hospitality as a pedagogical form of dialogue. Social pluralism is the context in which this structure is challenged, tested, and made educationally significant.

Beyond this introduction, the paper proceeds in four sections. Section 2 reconstructs the shift from the secularization paradigm to pluralism and selectively reviews major responses developed in contemporary RE, leading to the epistemological question that guides the article. Section 3 clarifies the nature of a school subject and the relationship between epistemological and pedagogical identity. Section 4 applies this framework to IRC, arguing for the ordering function of theology and for dialogicality as an epistemological principle. Section 5 develops the educational implications of the proposal and presents Italian IRC as one possible configuration through which disciplinary identity and openness can contribute to education in plural societies.

2. Religious Education in Plural Societies: Current Approaches and Open Questions

2.1. Pluralism, Engagement and Religious Diversity

Contemporary reflection on RE is situated within a broader shift in how modern societies interpret the public presence of religion. For a significant part of the twentieth century, secularization theory provided one of the main explanatory frameworks for this relationship. In its more linear formulations, modernisation, rationalization, and institutional differentiation were associated with a progressive decline in religion’s social relevance and its increasing privatization. The influence of this perspective extended well beyond the sociology of religion, shaping cultural representations of modernity, understandings of secularity, and criteria for defining the legitimate presence of religion in the public sphere.

This paradigm was gradually revised as evidence pointed to far more differentiated processes. Peter L. Berger, who had contributed significantly to classical secularization theory, later drew attention to the continuing vitality of religions and to the simultaneous presence of secularizing dynamics and movements of desecularization (Berger 1999). The relationship between modernity and religion thus appears characterized by pluralization, changing forms of belonging, increasingly differentiated individual trajectories, and a renewed public presence of religious communities. Karpov further refined this account by showing that secularization and desecularization can coexist in different domains of the same society and proceed at different rates (Karpov 2010). Contemporary modernity therefore presents a complex religious landscape in which religious convictions, forms of secularity, and non-religious orientations share the same social space.

The change in theoretical framework has also left cultural residues from the preceding paradigm. Karpov notes the long-standing influence of the assumption that modernisation would almost automatically diminish religion’s social relevance and, drawing on Berger, points to the prevalence of secularised orientations among intellectual elites (Karpov 2010, pp. 234, 250–51). In some European public cultures, this legacy continues to foster suspicion toward the public presence of religions, which are often treated primarily as private matters and kept at a distance from common institutions. Recent European educational policy, however, shows a significant development. Jackson recalls that until the early 2000s the Council of Europe did not include the study of religions within its educational work, partly because of an interpretation of the French principle of laïcité that tended to confine religion to the private sphere. From 2002 onward, this orientation was reconsidered, and the religious dimension entered explicitly into programmes devoted to intercultural education, human rights, and democratic citizenship (Jackson 2016). This transition is significant because it shows that the educational question can no longer be framed through the marginalisation of religion from public education.

In Berger’s later work, pluralism emerges as a category better suited than secularization to interpreting this new situation. Drawing on Berger, Diana Eck distinguishes mere diversity from pluralism and identifies the latter with engagement across differences: an intentional process through which persons and communities holding different convictions enter into relationship, learn about one another, and build forms of life together (Eck 2015). Plurality is a social fact; pluralism names a quality of relationships that requires knowledge, encounter, and participation. This shift is educationally decisive because it moves attention from the coexistence of different identities to the capacity to make them mutually intelligible and to create conditions for culturally meaningful encounter.

School is one of the settings in which this requirement becomes especially significant. Students encounter peers, languages, and interpretations of the world that express religious belonging, forms of spirituality, agnostic convictions, and different ways of attributing meaning to existence. Navigating such plurality requires reliable knowledge, interpretive capacities, awareness of one’s own position, and readiness to understand the positions of others. Religion therefore enters the curriculum as a culturally significant dimension of human experience and as part of the education needed for responsible participation in societies where religious and non-religious differences are an ordinary feature of life together.

Within this framework, dialogue also acquires a renewed educational meaning. Intercultural and interreligious dialogue becomes a form of learning through which differences gain public expression, are interpreted within concrete contexts, and contribute to more mature social relationships. International scholarship on RE has widely embraced this development and proposed different curricular responses. These approaches share the aim of providing students with cultural tools adequate to contemporary religious complexity, while differing in their conception of religion, the epistemological status of the subject, educational purposes, and relationship with confessional traditions.

2.2. Religious Education Between Knowledge and Dialogue

A first line of development has placed knowledge of religions at the centre of a more accurate public understanding of religion. In the British context, the transformation of RE was shaped first by phenomenological approaches and later by Robert Jackson’s interpretive approach. Jackson criticized representations of religions as homogeneous systems of beliefs and practices and proposed attention instead to the dynamic relationship among traditions, groups, and individuals. Religious knowledge thus assumes a hermeneutical structure: students encounter provisional and contextualised representations and compare them with concrete experiences that reveal internal plurality and historical transformation (Jackson 2008). The epistemological openness characteristic of this approach is intended to make the study of religion accessible to students holding different religious and non-religious convictions.

This concern for the quality of knowledge also found significant expression in initiatives developed by international institutions. The OSCE Toledo Guiding Principles locate teaching about religions and beliefs within the framework of freedom of religion or belief and human rights, emphasizing balanced and inclusive teaching and careful attention to bias in the representation of traditions (OSCE/ODIHR 2007). The document assigns knowledge of religions an important role in promoting tolerance and non-discrimination and in preparing teachers to work in increasingly diverse classrooms. It presents the public school as a space in which students with different convictions can acquire culturally reliable knowledge while their freedom of religion or belief is protected.

A similar orientation, with a more explicit intercultural and civic emphasis, characterizes the work of the Council of Europe. The White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue connects dialogue with human rights, democracy, participation, and social cohesion and identifies schools as key settings for the acquisition of intercultural competences (Council of Europe 2008). Subsequent Council work on religions and non-religious convictions develops this perspective by linking knowledge of religions, mutual understanding, personal development, and the capacity to live peacefully with diversity. Jackson notes that the public rationale for this orientation arises principally from the intersection of human rights education, democratic citizenship, and intercultural education while also including students’ existential and personal development (Jackson 2016).

This first area also includes contemporary proposals associated with religious literacy and the gradual broadening of the subject matter toward religions and worldviews. Religious literacy refers to the capacity to recognise languages, practices, symbols, internal differences, and the public relevance of religious traditions and thereby interpret their social presence more competently. The inclusion of worldviews extends the horizon to non-religious convictions and highlights that every student encounters religion from a particular interpretive position. Recent scholarship increasingly values contextual knowledge of religions and worldviews, with attention to lived practices and the plurality of concrete forms of belonging. Skrefsrud, for example, shows that RE loses part of its intercultural potential when encyclopedic classifications take precedence over the complexity of experiences, transformations, and relationships among traditions (Skrefsrud 2023).

A second line of reflection emphasises the educational significance of studying religion for personal development. Michael Grimmitt is a major reference point in this development. His distinction between religious instruction oriented toward commitment and RE justified on educational grounds leads to evaluating the subject by its capacity to deepen self-understanding and understanding of human life, broaden students’ perspectives, and foster independent thought (Engebretson 2004, pp. 8–9). In his later formulation, the relationship between learning about religion and learning from religion connects knowledge of traditions with the processes through which students interpret experience and construct meaning.

Rossiter develops a related perspective in the context of Australian Catholic Religious Education. His work assigns school-based religious education a cultural and critical function: it can help young people identify the sources from which they derive meanings, values, and images of the good life and evaluate them with greater awareness (Rossiter 2018, pp. 98–99). Religious tradition can offer interpretive resources within this process, while the educational outcome concerns students’ capacity to form judgements, understand their spirituality, and become active agents in culture. Even within a confessional context, the value of the subject is therefore linked to the educational quality of the experience offered and to respect for personal freedom.

A third line brings the preceding orientations together within education for citizenship and democratic pluralism. Knowledge of religions provides tools for interpreting phenomena that affect social life, public debate, and relations among groups; engagement with different convictions cultivates listening, argumentation, decentering, and recognition. The Council of Europe White Paper presents intercultural education as a condition for a democratic culture capable of combining diversity, equality, and participation, while the Toledo Guiding Principles emphasise the relationship between knowledge of religions, freedom of conscience, and the prevention of discrimination (Council of Europe 2008; OSCE/ODIHR 2007). From this perspective, dialogue has a public purpose: it prepares students to participate in a society where religious and philosophical disagreement can be expressed within a framework of mutual respect.

These three lines frequently intersect. Accurate knowledge of religions supports dialogue; dialogue contributes to personal development; and mature judgement and interpretive capacity support more informed citizenship. The distinction is therefore analytical, highlighting different starting points from which international scholarship has justified the presence of religion in the curriculum. Taken together, these contributions represent a significant advance: they have developed criteria for representing religious traditions more accurately, emphasised the active role of students, connected religious knowledge with freedom of conscience, and shown the potential of schools as spaces of encounter among different convictions.

The historical provenance of some of these arguments remains visible. Safeguards such as institutional neutrality, protection from indoctrination, and a clear distinction between the purposes of schools and those of religious communities have strong legal and pedagogical justification and have helped establish shared standards. They also emerged in contexts in which confessional reference was often perceived as a potential threat to students’ freedom. In some international documents, this history is reflected in a methodological choice to justify the presence of religion in school chiefly through aims such as human rights, tolerance, citizenship, conflict prevention, and intercultural competence. Religion is consequently approached primarily as an object of knowledge and as a social reality with which students need to learn to engage.

This orientation represents one important strand of the debate. Jackson himself argues that the social and instrumental aims associated with the Council of Europe’s work should be complemented by liberal education and by young people’s personal development (Jackson 2018). Grimmitt and Rossiter likewise show that religious knowledge can acquire educational significance through the encounter among content, experience, and the search for meaning. More recent scholarship on the intercultural character of RE confirms interest in approaches that hold together knowledge, participation, and transformation. The field therefore increasingly recognises dialogicality as a quality of the subject, while grounding it in different theoretical frameworks.

Recent scholarship has also made increasingly explicit the epistemological questions implicit in these developments. The growing emphasis on religions and worldviews has widened the range of perspectives represented within RE, while raising questions about the conceptual frameworks through which inclusivity itself is constructed. Moulin (2023), for example, identifies a “paradox of inclusivity” that emerges when inclusive pedagogical frameworks encounter religious or non-religious positions whose self-understanding does not fit easily within them. At the same time, recent work on powerful knowledge in RE has brought renewed attention to the nature, selection, and educational significance of the knowledge made available through the school subject (Franck and Thalén 2023). These developments reinforce the connection among the three lines considered above—knowledge of religions, personal development, and education for democratic pluralism—while also pointing towards a question that concerns the epistemological identity of RE itself.

2.3. The Missing Question

In plural societies, RE is called to make religious diversity intelligible, foster interpretive capacities, respect students’ freedom, and create conditions for encounter among different convictions. Dialogicality runs, with varying intensity, through approaches oriented toward knowledge, personal development, and democratic citizenship. It appears as a methodological principle, a competence to be learned, a quality of the educational environment, and a social purpose of the subject.

Most accounts ground this dialogicality primarily in the external conditions in which teaching takes place. The pluralization of societies, the presence of students with different affiliations, the need to prevent stereotypes and discrimination, the protection of freedom of conscience, and the task of educating citizens capable of living together provide strong and well-documented reasons. The paradigm of pluralism has enabled a positive reformulation of the issue: religious difference becomes a reality through which relationships are built, and dialogue becomes a practice through which diversity can become pluralism. A further possibility deserves attention: the dialogical quality of a school subject may also arise from the structure of the knowledge that grounds it.

The issue is therefore the relationship between epistemology and pedagogy. When RE is described mainly through social purposes, institutional models, or teaching methodologies, the way in which its object is known and organised can remain in the background. A subject grounded primarily in the history of religions, the social sciences, philosophy of religion, or theology may share educational aims with other models while approaching religion through different questions, methods, and criteria. These differences affect the selection of content, the conception of dialogue, and the educational possibilities offered to students.

From this perspective, neutrality and participation point to a deeper issue: the relationship between disciplinary identity and openness. A subject with a recognizable epistemological standpoint can develop authentic forms of dialogue when its cognitive structure disposes it toward encounter with otherness. An inclusive subject likewise requires explicit epistemological criteria for representing and interpreting different traditions. The theoretical problem therefore becomes one of understanding the conditions under which disciplinary identity can generate openness.

This article takes that question as the point of departure for its proposal. International scholarship has convincingly shown why RE should develop rigorous knowledge, respect for freedom, interpretive capacity, and dialogue in plural societies. The further step is to examine whether, and to what extent, these qualities can be traced to the epistemological structure of the subject itself. Addressing this problem first requires clarification of what constitutes the identity of a school subject and how the academic discipline or disciplines on which it is based are transformed pedagogically.

3. The Identity of a School Subject: Epistemological and Pedagogical Dimensions

Reflection on school-based RE requires a preliminary clarification of the nature of school subjects. Educational aims, curricular content, and teaching methodologies acquire coherence within a disciplinary configuration that gives them an overall orientation. From this perspective, a school subject can be understood as a culturally and pedagogically organised form of knowledge situated within the school curriculum and called to contribute, through its distinctive resources, to the education of the whole person.

The notion of school subject adopted here comprises two closely related dimensions. The first is epistemological and concerns the academic discipline—or coordinated set of academic disciplines—to which the subject refers, the standpoint from which it approaches reality, the concepts that structure its domain, its methods of inquiry, and its criteria for validating knowledge. The second is pedagogical and concerns the educational significance that an academic discipline acquires through its transformation into a school subject. Distinguishing these two dimensions makes it possible to recognise both the cultural substance of a school subject and the specific educational mediation that justifies its place within the curriculum.

Contemporary curriculum theory has brought disciplinary knowledge back to the foreground. Young and Muller emphasise the specialised, differentiated, and normatively regulated character of forms of knowledge that deserve access to the curriculum, linking such access to educational justice (Young and Muller 2013). Deng accepts the importance of this claim while highlighting the transformations through which academic knowledge becomes curricular content and educational experience (Deng 2021, 2025). The distinction proposed here between epistemological and pedagogical identity occupies precisely this theoretical space. It recognises the significance of the epistemic structure of academic disciplines while assigning school pedagogy the task of articulating their educational significance, their formative potential, and the conditions under which that potential can be realised (Porcarelli 2026). This perspective is consistent with Deng’s recent argument that pedagogy has the distinctive responsibility of addressing the educational purposes and educational significance of knowledge beyond its disciplinary organisation (Deng 2024, 2025) while extending that argument through the distinction proposed here between epistemological and pedagogical identity.

This framework is particularly relevant to school-based RE. Models of RE are often described in terms of their legal status, the selection of content, their relationship with religious communities, or their broader social aims. These elements acquire their full meaning when interpreted in relation to the epistemological and pedagogical configuration of the school subject. The dialogical quality of RE also depends on the way its object is constituted as knowledge and on the educational form generated through that knowledge.

3.1. The School Subject as a Cultural and Educational Construction

The distinction between academic discipline and school subject provides a first criterion for understanding the specificity of school knowledge. An academic discipline is understood here as an organised field of scholarly inquiry that investigates a particular domain of reality through characteristic questions, concepts, methods, and standards of validation. Its identity develops historically through processes of differentiation, debate, and revision within a scholarly community.

In the pedagogical sense adopted here, a school subject is the educational transformation of an academic discipline—or, in some cases, of a coordinated set of academic disciplines—within the school curriculum. Its defining characteristic lies in the formative significance attributed to that body of knowledge. The same academic discipline may give rise to different school subjects depending on the level of education, the educational setting, the age of the students, and the aims of the curriculum. Mathematics taught in primary school, in upper secondary education, or in a university economics programme clearly belongs to the same academic discipline, yet it takes on a different curricular form in each context through the selection of key concepts, the degree of formalisation, the cognitive practices it requires, and the educational purposes it serves.

The Humboldtian tradition places this relationship within an organic account of Bildung. In his brief essay on the internal and external organisation of the higher scientific institutions in Berlin, Humboldt presents Wissenschaft as an activity that is never definitively complete and links scholarly inquiry to personal formation through a living encounter with knowledge (Humboldt [1810] 1970). The reference plays a limited but structurally important role here. It highlights that an academic discipline, once transformed into a school subject, becomes oriented towards educational purposes while preserving the intellectual rigour and the dynamic of inquiry that characterise its scholarly origin.

A school subject therefore mediates between the objective forms of culture and the learner’s process of formation. Knowledge is selected, organised, and represented in forms that are educationally meaningful while preserving the internal logic that makes the academic discipline recognisable. This mediation involves educational institutions, curricular traditions, curriculum research, and teachers’ professional judgement. It also has a historical dimension: school subjects emerge, evolve, and sometimes disappear in response to cultural and social transformations, changing educational purposes, and different conceptions of the person and of education.

The purpose-built character of school subjects points to the cultural work through which scholarly knowledge becomes educational experience. Deng captures this specificity when he defines a school subject as “a uniquely purpose-built educational enterprise” (Deng 2021, p. 1666). The relationship with one or more academic disciplines remains constitutive, but it does not exhaust the identity of the school subject. Its curricular configuration includes the selection of content, the organisation of conceptual structures, the forms of inquiry made accessible to students, the languages through which knowledge is communicated, and the dispositions that the subject seeks to cultivate.

This perspective also clarifies the relationship between academic disciplines and school subjects. Young and Muller stress the value of specialised knowledge, distinguishing it from everyday knowledge through its purposes, organisation, and criteria of validation. Access to such knowledge constitutes, in their view, a matter of educational justice because it enables students to move beyond the limits of immediate experience and participate more fully in cultural and civic life (Young and Muller 2013, pp. 230–31). The transformation of academic disciplines into school subjects, however, requires additional educational judgements. The selection and organisation of content depend not only on disciplinary criteria but also on educational purposes, students’ developmental characteristics, teachers’ professional expertise, and the institutional context in which learning takes place.

3.2. Epistemological Identity

The epistemological identity of a school subject derives primarily from the configuration of the academic discipline—or coordinated set of academic disciplines—on which it is based. It includes its specific object, the generative questions that guide inquiry, its fundamental concepts, methods of investigation, forms of argumentation, and the criteria through which reliable knowledge is established. This identity distinguishes one school subject from another because it defines the particular form of rationality through which each approaches reality. Studying history, mathematics, literature, or biology therefore means entering different ways of questioning experience, constructing evidence, organising explanations, and communicating results.

Schwab’s distinction between substantive and syntactic structure provides an important resource for this analysis. Substantive structure comprises the organised body of concepts, principles, theories, and explanatory frameworks that constitute an academic discipline; syntactic structure concerns the procedures through which disciplinary knowledge is produced, tested, and revised. Access to a discipline therefore requires familiarity both with its conceptual content and with the ways in which that content is constructed, justified, and developed (Schwab 1964). Disciplinary understanding, in this sense, involves acquiring a distinctive grammar of thought.

Bruner developed this perspective by emphasising the generative structure of academic disciplines. A discipline’s modes of representation, economy, and effectiveness influence the learner’s ability to master it. Representation concerns the enactive, iconic, and symbolic forms through which knowledge can be expressed; economy refers to the capacity to organise a large body of knowledge through a relatively limited number of organising principles; effectiveness denotes the generative power of those principles, namely their capacity to produce new understanding and guide problem solving (Bruner 1966). A school subject therefore selects key concepts and cognitive practices capable of progressively introducing students into the structure of the academic discipline from which it derives.

Young and Muller further clarify this epistemological profile by highlighting several characteristics of specialised knowledge. Such knowledge is systematically revisable, governed by standards developed within disciplinary communities, and differentiated across the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. This differentiation reflects distinct ways of relating to reality and prevents any single form of scholarly inquiry from becoming a universal epistemological standard. Their argument therefore supports the integrity of academic disciplines without rigidifying their boundaries and recognises a plurality of forms of knowledge governed by distinct epistemic norms (Young and Muller 2013, pp. 235–46).

A school subject may derive predominantly from a single academic discipline or coordinate contributions from several disciplines. In the latter case, its epistemological identity requires an ordering principle capable of assigning function and proportion to the different contributions. A simple juxtaposition of heterogeneous content produces a thematic area rather than a school subject. A genuinely disciplinary configuration emerges only when the principal standpoint, the generative questions, and the relationship among the contributing disciplines are clearly defined.

This ordering principle may be described as the principal academic discipline or, in classical terminology, as a scientia rectrix. In the present context, the Latin expression does not denote the superiority of one discipline over others. Rather, it refers to the epistemic function through which one academic discipline provides the formal standpoint that organises the contribution of the others. The remaining disciplines retain their methodological autonomy and contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon under investigation while being integrated into a coherent disciplinary perspective. In this way, a plurality of academic disciplines can coexist within a school subject whose epistemological identity remains clearly recognisable.

A well-defined epistemological identity also makes interdisciplinarity possible. Dialogue among academic disciplines develops when each contributes its own perspective, recognises the limits of its domain, and receives insights from other disciplines. Young and Muller observe that “the conventions (or boundaries) of the discipline […] provide the conditions for being able to transcend them” (Young and Muller 2013, p. 246). This observation is particularly relevant for the present argument: openness does not arise from dissolving disciplinary identity but from the intellectual integrity of disciplinary languages, methods, and criteria.

Finally, epistemological identity has a historical and hermeneutical dimension. Academic disciplines are situated within traditions of inquiry shaped by controversies, paradigm shifts, and new discoveries. School subjects likewise need to communicate this dynamic character, presenting knowledge as both reliable and open to further development. Especially in secondary education, students are gradually introduced into a community of inquiry, where they learn that knowledge requires intellectual rigour, openness to dialogue, and awareness of the conditions under which claims are formulated.

3.3. Pedagogical Identity

Pedagogical identity concerns the distinctive educational contribution that a school subject makes to the formation of the person. It takes shape through the relationship between the structure of the academic discipline, the general purposes of schooling, and the characteristics of learners. Disciplinary content acquires educational significance when it fosters cognitive capacities, personal dispositions, and forms of understanding that enable students to deepen their knowledge of themselves, of others, and of the world.

The pedagogical dimension extends Schwab’s articulation of disciplinary structure. Alongside substantive and syntactic structure, it is possible to identify a formative structure: the set of educational possibilities for personal and cultural growth inherent in a school subject. Different academic disciplines cultivate different capacities and sensibilities. Mathematics develops coherence, rigour, and formalisation; history fosters an understanding of temporality and of the relationships between actions, contexts, and consequences; literature cultivates the interpretation of human experience through symbolic and narrative language; and the natural sciences develop systematic observation and the search for explanations that are both controlled and open to verification. These examples illustrate different formative potentials that become educationally effective through appropriate teaching practices and with due regard for the complexity of each school subject.

School pedagogy is concerned precisely with this mediation between knowledge and the formation of the person. Within the framework proposed here, it examines how school subjects contribute to integral education, clarifies the educational purposes that justify their place within the curriculum, and supports the professional judgement through which teachers select coherent learning experiences and teaching practices. The distinction between epistemological and pedagogical identity has been developed from this perspective: the former identifies the internal logic of the academic discipline, while the latter makes explicit its formative potential and the conditions under which that potential can be realised through teaching (Porcarelli 2026, pp. 143–48).

Recent scholarship within RE has addressed a closely related question by examining how subject-specific knowledge can provide students with intellectual resources for interpreting religious and existential questions in multireligious and secular contexts. Liljefors Persson (2023), in particular, relates powerful knowledge in RE to subject literacy, students’ capacity to engage with existential questions, and their participation in democratic and inclusive educational contexts. This perspective supports the view that the educational significance of a school subject arises not only from the content it makes available but also from the forms of understanding and judgement that such content enables students to develop.

The transition from epistemological identity to pedagogical identity requires a process of pedagogical mediation. Content selection gives priority to the most significant and generative key concepts; curricular progression organises learning through progressively higher levels of complexity; teaching activities transform concepts and methods into opportunities for intellectual engagement; and assessment considers students’ capacity to mobilise what they have learned in reflective and personally meaningful ways. Throughout this process, the teacher mediates between fidelity to the academic discipline and attention to the learner, so that disciplinary knowledge can become personally appropriated.

According to Deng, curricular transformation gives knowledge “new educational meanings and significance” (Deng 2021, p. 1664). The selection and organisation of curricular content derive from an educational vision and from consideration of its contribution to the development of human powers; the school subject therefore becomes an intentional educational construction shaped by formative purposes. In his more recent work, Deng further argues that the formation of school subjects involves more than the recontextualisation of academic disciplines, since it requires careful consideration of what particular content can contribute to the formation of the person and how that potential can be realised in educational practice (Deng 2025, pp. 71–72).

This convergence helps to clarify the distinction proposed here. Pedagogical identity is the form through which epistemological identity becomes educationally generative within schooling. The relationship between the two dimensions is not mechanical. The same academic discipline may take different curricular forms depending on the educational context and therefore requires contextual pedagogical judgement. A relationship of coherence nevertheless remains, because a school subject’s formative potential also arises from the way its academic discipline approaches reality, constructs knowledge, and shapes the learner’s way of engaging with its object.

The notion of Bildung helps clarify this process. Formation occurs through the living relationship between the learner’s subjectivity and the objectivity of cultural forms. Encounter with an academic discipline decentres the learner by exposing him or her to languages, criteria, and perspectives that do not originate in personal preference. At the same time, these cultural forms are understood, interpreted, and integrated into the learner’s own horizon of meaning. School culture thereby contributes to the formation of a person capable of openness, judgement, and responsibility.

Gardner has shown how academic disciplines represent historically developed forms of human inquiry and enable rigorous engagement with the great domains of truth, beauty, and goodness (Gardner 1999). Their educational significance also lies in providing intellectual structures through which students can orient themselves within the complexity of experience and resist the fragmentation of information. A school subject fulfils its educational purpose when it enables students to enter into the internal logic of the academic discipline, understand its fundamental questions, and progressively employ its criteria with increasing autonomy.

The pedagogical identity of a school subject therefore includes a particular understanding of the person and of human educability. Decisions about what deserves to be taught, which capacities should be cultivated, and which educational experiences should be offered express a conception of human life and of the educational good. Within the school curriculum, this conception is related to the public purposes of education, the socio-cultural context, students’ freedom, and the plural character of contemporary society. A school subject contributes to common education through its distinctive cultural resources, making them accessible in forms that respect freedom of conscience and sustain reasoned dialogue.

The relationship between the epistemological and pedagogical identity of a school subject is therefore decisive. A subject’s educational form arises from the way its academic discipline approaches reality and organises knowledge. Its teaching methods are coherent when they enable students to enter that particular form of rationality and experience its formative potential. A history subject will require practices of source analysis and contextual reconstruction; a philosophy subject will emphasise argumentation and critical examination of concepts; an arts subject will engage perception, imagination, and symbolic production. Teaching methods thus become expressions of disciplinary identity and of the educational purposes that guide its transformation into a school subject.

3.4. A Lens for Religious Education

The distinction between epistemological and pedagogical identity provides a valuable framework for interpreting different models of RE. Alongside institutional arrangements and declared educational aims, comparison may consider the academic discipline—or coordinated set of academic disciplines—that provides the principal epistemological reference, the standpoint from which religion is approached, the criteria governing the selection and interpretation of content, and the educational relationship generated by that configuration.

A school subject grounded primarily in the history of religions, the social sciences, philosophy of religion, or theology constructs different disciplinary objects even when addressing partly overlapping topics. Its generative questions, methods of inquiry, sources, and the significance attributed to students’ personal engagement vary accordingly. Each configuration can make a valuable contribution to education, provided that it makes its epistemological standpoint explicit and develops a coherent pedagogical identity.

The dialogical character of RE may itself be analysed at several interconnected levels: dialogue between religious knowledge and other forms of culture; dialogue among religious traditions and worldviews; dialogue within the educational relationship between teacher and students; and the inner dialogue through which students interpret what they encounter in light of their own experience and convictions. The quality of these forms of dialogue depends on the epistemological identity of the school subject and on the conception of the person that informs its pedagogical identity.

The perspective proposed here makes it possible to trace dialogicality back to the internal logic of the academic discipline on which RE is based, whenever that discipline is intrinsically oriented towards engagement with otherness, with other forms of knowledge, and with the freedom of the learner. Dialogue then becomes a constitutive dimension of content selection, source interpretation, interdisciplinary relationships, and educational practice. Social pluralism does not generate this dialogical orientation; rather, it makes its significance more evident and provides the context in which its educational potential can be realised.

Within this framework, the distinctive configuration of IRC in the Italian school system can now be examined. Its epistemological identity depends on identifying the principal academic discipline on which it is based, its relationship with other academic disciplines concerned with the study of religion, and the particular form of rationality that shapes its place within the curriculum. The following section argues that the theological foundation of IRC gives rise to a dialogical epistemology which, through pedagogical mediation, becomes the basis of its pedagogical identity.

4. The Epistemological Identity of Catholic Religious Education

The framework developed in Section 3 makes it possible to examine IRC by focusing on the academic disciplines that sustain its identity and on the form of rationality it introduces into the curriculum. The name of the subject itself indicates a strong reference to the Catholic tradition. Its educational coherence depends on the epistemological principle that orders its content, the relationship between theology and other academic disciplines, and the pedagogical mediation that gives these elements educational form. Reworking in a more specifically epistemological key the outline previously proposed in another work (Porcarelli 2022, pp. 99–105), the analysis understands dialogicality as a quality generated by the subject’s principal academic discipline and developed through openness to other academic disciplines, religious traditions, and students’ freedom.

4.1. Theology as Scientia Rectrix: The Epistemological Foundation of IRC

The epistemological identity of IRC is grounded in the theological disciplines. Academic preparation for teachers of IRC in Italy also includes the history of religions, philosophy, pedagogy, psychology, and other disciplines within the human and social sciences. The theological disciplines nevertheless provide the formal standpoint of the school subject and the unifying criterion through which these different contributions are coordinated. In terms consistent with the distinction introduced in Section 3, theology may be described as the scientia rectrix of IRC: it provides the perspective from which religion, the Christian tradition, and the anthropological questions they raise are approached within the school curriculum, while the other academic disciplines retain their own methodological integrity.

The ordering function of theology becomes particularly evident when considering the object of the school subject. IRC approaches religion as a historical, cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon while, at the same time, presenting the Christian tradition through the self-understanding it has developed throughout its history. The history of religions reconstructs historical developments and transformations; sociology examines religious belonging, practices, and institutions; psychology explores the dynamics of religious experience; philosophy investigates the rationality of belief together with fundamental metaphysical and anthropological questions. Each of these academic disciplines preserves its own methodological autonomy. Within IRC, however, their contributions are coordinated within a perspective in which Christianity is also approached through the sources, categories, and interpretative criteria proper to theology.

A clearly defined epistemological principle gives the school subject its disciplinary identity and prevents it from becoming a collection of religious themes assembled in response to contingent educational needs. Section 3 has shown that a school subject drawing on several academic disciplines requires a criterion capable of assigning function and proportion to their respective contributions. In IRC, this criterion is theological and, more specifically, Christocentric. The person of Jesus Christ stands at the centre of Christian reflection as the mediator of the relationship between God and humanity and as the hermeneutical key to Revelation witnessed in Scripture and transmitted through the Tradition of the Church (Porcarelli 2022; Cicatelli 2015). This orientation gives the school subject a clearly recognisable centre while making explicit dialogue with other forms of knowledge possible.

Part of the international literature on RE has approached theological reference with caution, especially where it has been associated with religious socialisation or with personal adherence in a catechetical sense. Grimmitt’s distinction between confessional instruction and school-based Religious Education arose precisely from the need to justify the presence of religion within the curriculum through educational purposes capable of commanding broader public agreement (Engebretson 2004, pp. 8–9). This requirement remains essential to the model proposed here. The theological character of the principal academic discipline identifies the epistemological standpoint of the school subject; its legitimacy within the curriculum depends on its capacity to generate knowledge, critical understanding, and personal development while fully respecting students’ freedom. Italian scholarship on IRC likewise emphasises that, following the 1984 revision of the Concordat, IRC was definitively reconfigured as a school subject situated “within the framework of the aims of the school” and clearly distinguished from catechesis (Cicatelli 2015).1

This distinction is also explicitly recognised within recent Catholic magisterial reflection. The Directory for Catechesis describes the relationship between catechesis and the teaching of Catholic religion in schools as one of “distinction in complementarity” and warns that failure to preserve the distinction risks obscuring the identity of both. Catechesis is directed towards personal adherence to Christ and the maturation of Christian life, whereas school-based teaching provides knowledge of the identity of Christianity and Christian life (Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization 2020, no. 313). From the perspective of the Church’s evangelising mission, school-based RE may therefore possess an ecclesial significance while retaining its specifically educational purposes, methods, and respect for students’ freedom.

Recent scholarship also points to a possible role for theology in rethinking RE beyond confessional contexts. Discussing the Norwegian case, Skrefsrud argues that intercultural theology can provide important resources even for non-confessional RE, particularly by challenging static representations of religions and making visible their internal plurality, contextual character, and reciprocal relationships (Skrefsrud 2023, pp. 1–3). This observation is particularly relevant to the present argument because it shows how a theological perspective can provide a framework within which the complexity of religion is interpreted and brought into dialogue with other academic approaches.

The notion of theology as the scientia rectrix of IRC should therefore be understood in functional rather than hierarchical terms. Theology provides the epistemological centre of the school subject and gives coherence to its overall perspective, while dialogue with other academic disciplines broadens and deepens the understanding of the realities under investigation. This relationship becomes particularly significant in the anthropological domain. Christian tradition understands Revelation as God’s word addressed to the human person and therefore develops a theological anthropology that naturally enters into dialogue with philosophy, the human sciences, and the social sciences. Gaudium et Spes expresses this openness both when it affirms that nothing genuinely human is foreign to the community of Christ’s disciples (Second Vatican Council 1965b, no. 1) and when it calls theology to remain in living dialogue with contemporary culture and with the findings of the different academic disciplines (no. 62). Interdisciplinarity therefore belongs to the very logic of theological reflection itself and prepares the transition to the dialogical character of the school subject.

4.2. Dialogicality as an Epistemological Principle

The dialogical character of IRC finds its deepest foundation in the Christian understanding of Revelation. Dei Verbum articulates this structure in explicitly relational terms:

In His goodness and wisdom God chose to reveal Himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of His will (see Eph. 1:9) by which through Christ, the Word made flesh, man might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father and come to share in the divine nature (see Eph. 2:18; 2 Peter 1:4). Through this revelation, therefore, the invisible God (see Col. 1:15, 1 Tim. 1:17) out of the abundance of His love speaks to men as friends (see Ex. 33:11; John 15:14–15) and lives among them (see Bar. 3:38), so that He may invite and take them into fellowship with Himself (Second Vatican Council 1965a, no. 2).

Theological knowledge begins with the reception of a word offered within a relationship and calling to be understood, interpreted, and transmitted. In the 2022 volume, this element was identified as the first feature of IRC’s epistemology: the academic discipline on which it is grounded depends on a “foundational dialogue,” from which a structural disposition toward relationship follows (Porcarelli 2022, p. 99). Dialogue belongs to the way theology knows its object. Christian Revelation presents itself as a historical and personal event, received by an interpreting community and transmitted through languages, texts, symbols, and practices. Theological reflection therefore assumes a fundamentally relational form: it develops through the relationship between faith and reason, Scripture and Tradition, historical experience and interpretation, the heritage of faith and the questions arising in different cultural contexts. When this structure becomes the epistemological foundation of a school subject, dialogicality guides the organisation of content as well as the choice of teaching practices.

A second element derives from the Christological form of Revelation. Reference to Christ gives IRC a recognisable perspective; at the same time, the conciliar understanding of the relationship between Christ and humanity opens that perspective to every person’s experience. Gaudium et Spes states that the mystery of the human person is illuminated in the mystery of the Incarnate Word (Second Vatican Council 1965b, no. 22). Epistemologically, this claim directs theology toward universal questions concerning identity, freedom, good and evil, suffering, hope, and human destiny. The sapiential approach proposed for IRC consists precisely in locating knowledge and problems within this horizon of meaning and bringing the Christian response into dialogue with questions that traverse personal experience and contemporary culture.

The relationship with other religions shows with particular clarity how identity and openness can belong to the same epistemological movement. Nostra Aetate recognises in religious traditions the search for answers to the great questions of the human condition and declares that the Catholic Church “rejects nothing that is true and holy” in them (Second Vatican Council 1965c, nos. 1–2). The document retains its Christological reference while affirming the duty to recognise sincerely elements of truth and holiness found elsewhere. For IRC, this orientation has a precise consequence: the study of other religions belongs intrinsically to the subject’s theological perspective because it follows directly from the Catholic understanding of religious otherness.

This point brings the proposal into dialogue with several insights from international scholarship while preserving a different grounding. Jackson’s interpretive approach emphasises the need to represent religions in their internal complexity and to involve students in an open hermeneutical process, avoiding homogeneous and immutable representations of traditions. Jackson describes this stance as “epistemological openness” and connects it with students’ ability to clarify and articulate their own positions without having the teacher’s epistemology imposed upon them (Jackson 2008, pp. 22–24). The conception of IRC developed here reaches a similar educational requirement through a different theoretical route: epistemological openness is rooted in a dialogical understanding of Revelation and in theology’s recognition of otherness.

Contemporary intercultural reflection further clarifies the scope of this openness. Skrefsrud observes that RE risks losing part of its intercultural potential when it organises religions as closed systems and privileges encyclopaedic knowledge over lived practices, transformations, and relationships among traditions (Skrefsrud 2023, pp. 2–3). The approach proposed for IRC addresses this concern through its dialogical structure: theological identity provides an explicit standpoint, while recognition of the historicity and plurality of religious experience requires sustained engagement with sources, religious communities, the history of religions, and the interpretations of the people concerned.

Interdisciplinary dialogue belongs to the same framework. As its principal academic discipline, theology necessarily encounters forms of disciplinary expertise that it cannot replace. Understanding a biblical text requires linguistic, historical, and archaeological tools; analysing the public presence of religions entails sociological and legal categories; the dynamics of belief and belonging can be illuminated by psychology; and questions of truth, freedom, and the rational justification of convictions engage philosophy. The function of scientia rectrix is to coordinate these contributions in relation to the formal object of IRC while allowing each academic discipline to operate according to its own grammar. Epistemological dialogicality thus also takes the form of a school subject capable of working across disciplinary boundaries without losing its centre.

This configuration makes it possible to formulate the central thesis of the article more precisely. Religious and cultural pluralism makes dialogue especially urgent and multiplies the occasions for its exercise. In IRC, however, the primary source of dialogicality is epistemological: it lies in a theology grounded in Revelation understood as relationship, called to interpret human existence, oriented toward engagement with culture, and committed, in its conciliar self-understanding, to the respectful recognition of other religious traditions. The plural context provides the educational setting in which this structure is activated, tested, and made educationally visible.

4.3. From Epistemological Identity to Pedagogical Identity

A school subject acquires its educational significance when the internal logic of its academic discipline is transformed into educational experience through content selection, curricular organisation, and teachers’ professional judgement. In IRC, the dialogical character of theology therefore shapes the way the school subject engages students and organises the relationship between the Christian tradition, other religions, worldviews, and the fundamental questions of human existence. Its pedagogical identity translates the generative features of theology into forms consistent with the purposes of schooling.

The first of these features concerns the relationship between identity and freedom. The Catholic perspective is presented in a recognisable and academically accountable form so that students may encounter it in its historical, cultural, and theological integrity. A clearly articulated epistemological standpoint makes authentic engagement possible. The educational aims are understanding, interpretative capacity, reasoned dialogue, and the gradual formation of personal judgement. In this sense, the confessional character of IRC may be understood as a guarantee of the authenticity of the perspective presented, while students remain entirely free in relation to the religious claims they encounter.

The distinction between epistemological grounding and educational purpose connects with a central insight of international scholarship: school-based RE is justified by the educational quality of the experience it offers and by respect for personal freedom. Grimmitt, as interpreted by Engebretson, formulated this criterion with particular clarity, while Rossiter developed it within the context of Australian Catholic RE (Engebretson 2004; Rossiter 2018). Within the framework proposed here, this requirement becomes a criterion for the pedagogical transformation of a school subject grounded in theology.

In an address to IRC teachers, Benedict XVI emphasised the need to “link theology, philosophy and science between them in full respect for the methods proper to them and for their reciprocal autonomy, but also in the awareness of the intrinsic unity that holds them together” (Benedict XVI 2009). In the same address, he observed that “The religious dimension is in fact intrinsic to culture. It contributes to the overall formation of the person and makes it possible to transform knowledge into wisdom of life” (Benedict XVI 2009). These statements belong to the magisterial tradition rather than to curriculum theory, yet they remain fully consistent with the argument developed here: the epistemological function of theology generates a pedagogical form through which its formative potential can be realised within a school subject.

The second consequence concerns the quality of educational dialogue. A relational epistemology calls for educational practices in which students become genuine interlocutors. This involves listening to their questions, attending to the experiences and convictions they bring into the classroom, enabling them to articulate both agreement and disagreement, and cultivating forms of reflexivity through which religious tradition can be related to their own horizon of meaning. The educational task is to create the conditions in which encounter leads to deeper understanding, more mature judgement, and greater awareness of one’s own position.

Jackson provides an important point of reference when he connects the interpretive approach with a pedagogy open to all students, regardless of their religious or secular convictions, and oriented towards eliciting and clarifying their own positions (Jackson 2008, pp. 22–24). In the conception of IRC developed here, such openness is fully compatible with a clearly defined epistemological identity. The two approaches remain theoretically distinct because IRC explicitly adopts Catholic theology as its scientia rectrix. Their convergence concerns a fundamental pedagogical principle: respect for students’ freedom and the understanding of RE as an educational rather than an initiatory practice.

Recent research also suggests that rigorous subject knowledge and interreligious dialogue need not be treated as separate educational aims. Orchard and Bowen (2024), for example, explore how teachers’ subject-specific knowledge of interreligious dialogue can inform curriculum development and contribute to relationships across religious differences, thereby connecting disciplinary understanding with the relational purposes of RE.

The dialogical character of theology also shapes IRC’s relationship with culture by placing the Christian tradition in dialogue with contemporary interpretations of human existence and social life. Section 5 develops the educational implications of this perspective through the categories of identity formation, anthropological openness, and hospitality.

A further consequence concerns the encounter with other religions and worldviews. From the perspective of Nostra Aetate, knowledge of the other involves respect, discernment, and the willingness to recognise what is true and valuable. Within the school curriculum, this orientation requires accurate representations of religious traditions, careful attention to their internal plurality, and educational opportunities through which different identities may be understood in their own complexity. The history of religions and interpretive approaches are indispensable in this respect, while theology provides the epistemological criterion through which IRC understands the meaning of interreligious dialogue. The result is a form of openness that preserves the identity of the school subject while making genuine encounter between different positions possible.

A related principle appears, in a different institutional context, in the Congregation for Catholic Education’s The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue, which maintains that a culture of dialogue presupposes a recognisable identity (Congregation for Catholic Education 2022, no. 2). Although the document concerns Catholic schools rather than IRC as such, the principle is relevant to the relationship between identity and openness developed here.

5. Educational Consequences of a Dialogical Epistemology

The epistemological configuration outlined above acquires its specifically educational significance when it is translated into the life of the school through pedagogical mediation. The dialogical character of IRC shapes the way the school subject contributes to the formation of the person, to the development of sound judgement, and to the capacity to inhabit plural societies consciously and responsibly. In continuity with the distinction developed in Section 3, these educational processes may be understood as expressions of the subject’s pedagogical identity.

The educational consequences of this epistemological configuration may be considered along four closely related dimensions. The first concerns identity formation, understood as the progressive capacity to recognise, interpret, and assume responsibility for one’s own position. The second concerns anthropological openness, namely the widening of the horizon within which students understand human existence and its fundamental questions. The third identifies hospitality as the pedagogical form through which dialogicality becomes educational practice, creating a space in which different identities may encounter one another while preserving their own cultural integrity. The fourth considers Italian IRC as one possible educational configuration through which a religious tradition contributes to the construction of pluralism by means of explicit, critical, and responsible engagement.

5.1. Identity Formation

Identity formation is one of the educational purposes most directly associated with the nature of RE. Every school subject contributes to the formation of the person by offering students languages, categories, and criteria through which they can interpret themselves and the world. A school subject that takes religious experience as its distinctive object also offers access to traditions of meaning through which generations and communities have engaged the fundamental questions of human existence. The educational contribution of IRC is situated within this horizon and assumes a distinctive character through its explicit grounding in the Christian tradition.

International scholarship has long recognised the relationship between the study of religion and personal formation. In Engebretson’s interpretation, Grimmitt argues that RE—including forms developed from a confessional standpoint through a phenomenological approach—can broaden and deepen students’ perspectives, foster self-understanding, and encourage independent thought: “this approach to the organisation of content in the teaching of religion did introduce students to a ‘mode of thought and awareness’ that had the potential to enhance self-understanding and understanding of human life; that it did help to widen and deepen the student’s perspectives in ways that contributed to his or her human development; that it could be used in ways that fostered independent thought” (Engebretson 2004, p. 8). Rossiter develops a closely related perspective within Australian Catholic Religious Education, arguing that the school-based study of religion can provide students with resources for critically interpreting culture, spirituality, and systems of meaning, thereby strengthening their agency in the formation of personal identity (Rossiter 2018). In both cases, the educational significance of the school subject emerges from the quality of the encounter between religious knowledge, students’ lived experience, and reflective judgement.

Within the model proposed here, identity formation assumes a dialogical form. Students encounter a tradition that possesses its own historical, theological, and cultural integrity and are invited to understand it, interpret it, and relate it to their own horizon of meaning. The Christian tradition thus becomes a genuine interlocutor in the educational process. Personal identity develops through the exercise of judgement, the capacity to articulate one’s own convictions, attentive engagement with different positions, and the progressive assumption of responsibility for the choices that shape one’s life. This conception also resonates with Różańska’s notion of an “open religious identity”, in which rootedness in one’s own religious tradition is associated with reflexivity, knowledge of religious pluralism, and a positive disposition towards religious otherness (Różańska 2018). From this perspective, openness develops through the reflective appropriation of identity and through encounter with other convictions.

This perspective is also reflected in the curricular configuration of Italian IRC, whose National Guidelines explicitly connect the school subject with the development of a free and responsible identity and with the capacity to shape a personal life project. In the 2022 volume, this dimension was interpreted as the anthropological-existential dimension of the subject, in which religious knowledge enters into dialogue with questions concerning freedom, relationships, the good, suffering, the future, and the meaning of existence (Porcarelli 2022, pp. 102–3, 137). The distinctive contribution of IRC lies in relating these questions to the Christian tradition while, at the same time, bringing them into dialogue with other religious and secular interpretations present within contemporary culture.

Identity formation therefore unfolds as an open and reflective process. The epistemological clarity and theological integrity of the school subject offer students a recognisable and trustworthy interlocutor in relation to which they may appropriate, reinterpret, discuss, or critically distance themselves from the perspectives they encounter. The educational task is to foster a deeper understanding of oneself and of the reasons underlying one’s own convictions, cultivating the capacity for judgement that belongs to the general purposes of schooling and that, within Religious Education, is exercised in relation to questions of particular personal, cultural, and existential significance.

5.2. Anthropological Openness

Anthropological openness designates the capacity of a school subject to broaden students’ understanding of human existence by bringing specialised forms of knowledge into dialogue with the fundamental questions of the human person. In IRC, this openness derives from the structure of Christian theology, for which Revelation concerns both the mystery of God and the understanding of the human person. The conciliar affirmation that Christ sheds light on the mystery of the human person (Gaudium et Spes, no. 22) gives this openness a distinctive form: religious questions are brought into dialogue with questions concerning identity, freedom, relationships, justice, human limitation, suffering, hope, and destiny.

This category further clarifies the educational significance of the sapiential perspective introduced above. A sapiential approach relates knowledge and inquiry within a broader horizon of meaning, connecting what is learned with questions concerning the overall significance of human experience. IRC fulfils this educational function when it helps students recognise the anthropological implications of cultural representations, social models, scientific and technological developments, and ethical choices. The school subject thus becomes a curricular space in which different understandings of the human person can be made explicit, compared, and critically evaluated.

Anthropological openness complements the sapiential approach. Because theological reflection speaks of God in relation to the human person, it necessarily enters into dialogue with philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, literature, and the other academic disciplines that seek to understand human existence. This interdisciplinary orientation acquires particular educational significance within the school curriculum, where the differentiation of school subjects calls for opportunities through which students can reconnect different perspectives and recognise the fundamental questions they share.

Anthropological openness also contributes to a critical reading of culture. Rossiter emphasises the need for Catholic RE to help young people interpret the cultural sources that shape images of happiness, success, the body, relationships, and the good life, offering religious and moral categories as resources for critical evaluation (Rossiter 2018, pp. 98–99). This task corresponds closely to one of the distinctive responsibilities of school pedagogy (Porcarelli 2026): accompanying students in encounters with cultural forms that broaden their horizon of meaning and foster progressively greater autonomy of judgement. Religious Education contributes to this task through the distinctive resources of the Christian tradition and through the particular form of rationality that characterises its academic discipline.

The anthropological horizon also provides significant common ground for interreligious dialogue. Religious traditions encounter one another through the fundamental questions of the human condition and through the different responses they have developed. Nostra Aetate explicitly situates relations among religions within this horizon, recalling questions concerning the meaning of life, good and evil, suffering, happiness, and human destiny (Second Vatican Council 1965c, no. 1). Within the school curriculum, these questions create opportunities for dialogue in which doctrinal, symbolic, and ritual differences become intelligible in relation to people’s lived experience and their search for meaning.

Anthropological openness therefore describes an educational orientation that can be shared by different school subjects and assumes particular significance within RE. Students are guided to engage the complexity of human existence, to recognise the presuppositions underlying different interpretations, and to situate their own convictions within a broader horizon of meaning. In this way, the school subject makes a distinctive contribution to integral education by cultivating the capacity to hold together knowledge, experience, meaning, and responsibility.

5.3. Hospitality as a Pedagogical Category

Hospitality provides a pedagogical form that is particularly consistent with the dialogical character of IRC. In the biblical tradition, hospitality carries a significance that extends far beyond the moral duty of welcoming the stranger. Abraham’s encounter with the three mysterious visitors by the oaks of Mamre (Gen. 18:1–15) appears as an encounter with the divine guest. Throughout the Old Testament, the command to welcome the stranger is inseparably linked to Israel’s memory of having lived as a foreign people in Egypt. The relational style of Jesus brings this tradition to fulfilment: he encounters tax collectors, sinners, Samaritans, and foreigners as genuine interlocutors, shaping a form of relationship in which encounter with the other becomes a privileged place of revelation, mutual recognition, and shared human growth. Hospitality thus belongs to the fundamental grammar of the educational relationship that springs from Revelation and offers a particularly fruitful category for interreligious dialogue.

This perspective receives significant development in the post-conciliar magisterium. In the encyclical Redemptoris Missio, John Paul II presents interreligious dialogue as an integral dimension of the Church’s evangelising mission and defines it as “a method and means of mutual knowledge and enrichment” (John Paul II 1990, no. 55). The same document emphasises that dialogue arises from respect for the action of the Holy Spirit in persons and religious traditions and calls each interlocutor to remain faithful to his or her own religious identity while opening to the understanding of the other, in the awareness that such encounter can become a source of genuine mutual enrichment (John Paul II 1990, nos. 55–56). The dialogical character of theology described in Section 4 thus finds one of its clearest expressions in the Church’s understanding of mission and of relations with other religions.

Within school pedagogy, hospitality designates the educational form through which a school subject creates a space in which different identities can encounter one another while preserving their own cultural integrity and opening themselves to a deeper understanding of human experience. Hospitality therefore describes the way in which the epistemological identity of IRC generates its pedagogical identity. The school subject makes the Christian tradition accessible in its authenticity while creating the conditions in which other religious traditions, worldviews, and cultural experiences may be encountered in their own voice and brought into dialogue within a framework of mutual recognition.

This perspective also finds support in recent educational scholarship. In discussing the relationship between confessional identity, intercultural education, and interreligious dialogue, Macale proposes a model of Catholic RE that welcomes the voices of different religious traditions by involving representatives and members of their communities directly in the design of educational experiences. Such an approach enables students to encounter religions through their own self-understanding as well as through scholarly interpretation, fostering forms of knowledge that are both more rigorous and more respectful of the complexity of religious experience (Macale 2020). It represents a significant pedagogical translation of the logic of hospitality.

International scholarship on RE offers convergent insights. Jackson has shown that an adequate representation of religious traditions requires attention to their internal plurality, to the relationship between traditions, communities, and individuals, and to the interpretative character of religious experience (Jackson 2008). Drawing on intercultural theology, Skrefsrud likewise emphasises educational practices that help students recognise the relationships between religion, culture, and lived experience, thereby developing intercultural competence through engagement with the complexity of religious traditions (Skrefsrud 2023). Pedagogical hospitality brings these insights together within a disciplinary configuration in which the Christian perspective is stated explicitly and provides the epistemological standpoint from which encounter with other traditions is organised.

The logic of hospitality also shapes the educational relationship with students and the construction of the curriculum. Every student enters the classroom with a personal history, religious or secular convictions, cultural affiliations, existential questions, and lived experiences that form part of the educational context. A dialogical school subject welcomes these elements within a learning environment where attentive listening, reasoned argument, critical reflection, careful use of language, and accurate representation of different traditions become ordinary educational practices. Curriculum design, the selection of sources, first-person testimony, interdisciplinary collaboration, and sustained attention to the fundamental questions of human existence are thus integrated within a coherent pedagogical framework. Whenever appropriate, this logic may also take concrete form by inviting representatives of other religious communities into RE classes or through guided visits to synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship, where students can encounter members of other traditions directly.

From this perspective, hospitality becomes the pedagogical form of dialogical pluralism. It makes possible the dynamic of engagement described by Diana Eck, in which religious differences are brought into relationship in ways that can generate mutual understanding, deeper interpretations of reality, and new possibilities for collaboration. IRC can therefore offer students an educational space in which the Christian tradition and other religious traditions contribute, through dialogue, to a shared search for truth and to the formation of the person, precisely because the school subject speaks from a clearly recognisable epistemological identity.

5.4. Italian IRC as a Possible Educational Response

The characteristics outlined above make it possible to regard Italian IRC as one possible educational response to the challenges posed by plural societies. Its theoretical significance lies in the combination of several elements: a clearly articulated epistemological identity, a principal academic discipline, a theological epistemology oriented towards dialogue, full integration within the school curriculum, and a pedagogical identity directed towards students’ freedom. This configuration is rooted in the legal, educational, and cultural history of Italy while offering conceptual categories that may prove fruitful in other educational contexts. Empirical research on IRC has examined both state schools and Catholic equivalent schools, documenting the concrete implementation of the subject and the differences that emerge between these educational settings (Malizia and Pieroni 2019). Such evidence provides an important contextual background, although the present article is concerned primarily with the theoretical and epistemological configuration of IRC rather than with an empirical evaluation of its implementation.

The dialogue with Diana Eck’s understanding of pluralism completes the theoretical trajectory developed in this article. Engagement with difference requires persons and traditions capable of presenting themselves within a shared public space through recognisable identities and of building relationships that generate mutual understanding, encounter, and transformation (Eck 2015). The dialogical character of IRC can contribute to this process by offering students an educational experience in which religious difference is not only studied and interpreted but also encountered through authentic dialogue.

The distinctive contribution of this configuration lies in the relationship between identity and openness. A school subject rooted in a particular tradition can cultivate the capacity for encounter, recognition, and understanding of otherness when dialogue belongs to its epistemological identity rather than functioning merely as an external educational strategy. Confessional identity, understood as the authenticity of the perspective presented, makes transparent the standpoint from which the school subject speaks, while its dialogical character orients that standpoint towards encounter with other perspectives. This relationship offers one possible way of addressing a central tension within contemporary RE: how to develop an educational form that both values the distinctive identity of religious traditions and prepares students for life together within religiously and culturally plural societies.

Italian IRC therefore functions as a theoretical laboratory rooted in the specific historical, cultural, and legal circumstances of the Italian context. Different constitutional arrangements, educational systems, and religious traditions make its institutional configuration context-specific and therefore not directly transferable. What can be transferred, however, is the theoretical question that this configuration makes visible: how can the epistemological identity of a religious school subject become a resource for a pedagogy of dialogue? The argument developed in this article suggests one possible sequence: a dialogical epistemology gives rise to a dialogical pedagogical identity; this pedagogical identity finds educational expression in practices of identity formation, anthropological openness, and hospitality; and these educational practices can contribute to mature forms of pluralism.

From this perspective, social pluralism functions both as the educational context in which the school subject operates and as the criterion against which its dialogical character is tested. It challenges RE to make its openness effective, to ensure accurate representations of other traditions, to respect the plurality of convictions present in the classroom, and to create genuine opportunities for engagement. The educational contribution of IRC lies precisely in addressing these tasks from the standpoint of a clearly articulated epistemological identity capable of generating openness, sound judgement, and authentic relationships.

A broader educational horizon for this perspective can be found in Leo XIV’s recent Apostolic Letter Drawing New Maps of Hope. Faced with what he describes as a complex, fragmented, and digitised educational environment, the Letter calls for renewed attention to the “cosmology of Christian paideia”, understood as a tradition capable of continually renewing itself and of bringing faith and reason, thought and life, knowledge and justice into relation (Leo XIV 2025, no. 1.2). Within the more specific context examined here, the image of “drawing new maps of hope” offers a suggestive way of understanding the educational task of RE: enabling students to engage inherited traditions as resources for interpreting the present and opening responsible horizons for the future.

At the same time, this perspective leaves important questions open for further research. If dialogicality is understood as a consequence of epistemological identity, its educational implications require further investigation at the curricular, didactic, and professional levels. Future research should therefore explore how a dialogical epistemology can inform curriculum design, teaching practices, and teacher education, as well as how these principles may be interpreted within educational systems shaped by different constitutional, cultural, and religious traditions. Rather than proposing a model to be transferred as such, the Italian experience offers a conceptual framework through which these questions may be examined in diverse contexts and through which the relationship between disciplinary identity, educational dialogue, and pluralism may continue to be developed.

6. Conclusions

The argument developed in this article has sought to address a question that remains comparatively underexplored within contemporary scholarship on RE. While international research has convincingly shown why RE should foster dialogue in religiously and culturally plural societies, less attention has been devoted to the relationship between dialogue and the epistemological identity of the school subject itself. The proposal advanced here has been to relocate this question within the framework of curriculum theory by distinguishing between the epistemological identity of a school subject and its pedagogical identity.

From this perspective, a school subject is understood as the educational transformation of an academic discipline—or, where appropriate, of a coordinated set of academic disciplines—within the school curriculum. Its pedagogical identity expresses the educational significance and formative potential that emerge when the epistemological identity of the underlying academic discipline is translated into educational experience through pedagogical mediation. This distinction provides a conceptual framework that can be applied to different models of RE and offers a more precise account of the relationship between disciplinary identity and educational purpose.

Applied to Italian IRC, this framework identifies theology as the scientia rectrix of the school subject. Theology performs this function not in a hierarchical sense but by providing the epistemological standpoint that organises the contribution of the other academic disciplines involved in the study of religion. The Christian understanding of Revelation as relationship, the Christological orientation of theological anthropology, the dialogue between faith and reason, openness to other academic disciplines, and the recognition of religious otherness articulated by the Second Vatican Council together support a dialogical epistemology. Within this perspective, dialogue is not primarily a pedagogical technique or a response imposed by social pluralism; it belongs to the internal logic of the academic discipline on which the school subject is grounded.

The educational implications of this proposal have been explored through three closely related categories: identity formation, anthropological openness, and hospitality. Together they describe the pedagogical identity generated by a dialogical epistemology. Hospitality emerges as the pedagogical form through which epistemological dialogicality becomes educational practice, creating a learning environment in which different traditions and worldviews may encounter one another while preserving their own integrity within a relationship of mutual recognition, critical understanding, and shared inquiry.

The proposal remains intentionally theoretical and contextually situated. Italian IRC is not presented as an institutional model to be transferred into different educational systems, but as a theoretical laboratory that makes visible a more general question: under what conditions can the epistemological identity of a religious school subject become a resource for a pedagogy of dialogue? This question remains open and invites further comparative and empirical research. Future studies may examine how dialogical epistemologies are translated into curriculum design, classroom practice, teacher education, and educational policy in different constitutional, cultural, and religious contexts. In this sense, the framework proposed here aims to contribute to an ongoing conversation in which disciplinary identity and educational dialogue are understood not as competing alternatives but as mutually generative dimensions of school-based RE.