James Conroy is Vice-Principal of Internationalization at the University of Glasgow (UK) and professor of religious and philosophical education. At the University of Glasgow, he has also served as Dean of the School of Education and Director of the Religious Education Department. He is currently a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford.

He has also served as President of the Association for Moral Education and currently chairs the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. In 2011, he was elected member of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is the author of over 100 papers and essays and three monographs, the most recent of which received an award in 2014 from the Society for Educational Studies.

Professor Conroy was one of the main speakers at the international conference on "The Abrahamic religions and interfaith relations in the past and present," organized by the Religion and Civil Society project of the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra.

We live in a globalized and complex world; can we say that religious education is, now more than ever, very important?

I believe that religious education has always been important. People should know the culture and traditions from which they emerge. It is curious that, in a global world with capital, money, resources and people moving around, the idea of ​​a greater ability for mutual understanding seems to be extremely problematic.

Religious education in Europe faces the great difficulty that citizens are not equipped with adequate religious literacy. Because of its ritual practice of religion and the ethical obsessions of modernity that are found there, the Old Continent is more aware of why people are religious and the claims that religion makes on people, who then try respond in their lives and practices.

How can religion promote mutual understanding between religions?

Education must do what is expected of it: educate people. Education suffers when knowledge is confused with affection or feelings. And when this happens, the individual suffers.

Education on and about religion allows the person to more deeply understand the tenets of religion, including theological and ethical tenets, as well as those with specific meanings that originate in a deep understanding of human hope, aspirations, fear, passion... Education itself must address all these things, helping at the same time to improve coexistence in a rapidly changing and globalized world.

What is the best model of education to promote mutual understanding between religions and interreligious dialogue?

There are many ways to do it. Undoubtedly, one of them is to put people of different religions in contact with each other. A good way to do this and promote understanding includes providing facilities or programs that keep people in constant contact with others.

Educating the person to understand the other helps, but it is most important to educate the person first to understand him or her self, his or her religious traditions and his or her psychological relationship with that tradition because it is the foundation on which everything else is built.

Could you summarize the main ideas or conclusions from you paper "Does religious education work"?

This monograph is the result of a three-year ethnographic study on the practice of religious education conducted in 24 schools in the United Kingdom. In performing this study, we found several interesting things. First, there is a belief that religious education is meant to contain many educational obligations, from sex education to moral or civic education. In addition, we found that some textbooks and materials for students do not have enough support and are often poorly written or misused in schools. Third, the employee examination system does not test for very sophisticated knowledge of religion and, often, teachers are poorly prepared and confused about what is expected of them.

There is also a notable and high degree of confusion with people's feelings, beliefs and knowledge. Knowledge is normally obscured by feelings, which is a big problem because if I feel that something is true then it must be true.

These are the five main points we can draw from the study, but there is one more: religious education often does not take theology seriously, whether it refers to Christianity, Judaism or Islam. Students do not face the question of why people believe in certain things, how people see them, and how they formulate their beliefs.

Is religious education also important for nonbelievers?

Absolutely. I think all human beings in a liberal democratic society must be able to understand, participate and live with people of very different cultural, religious, and social backgrounds.

A good religious education should produce religious literacy and should be prepared at a level that can be widely taught. This literacy is not meant to force people to believe in anything in specific; rather, it helps students understand religion's grammar, geography, topography and how religion brings culture to societies. Ignorance of these facets creates a deep void in public education, including for non-believers.

State funding for religion is an ongoing debate. What arguments can be used to support it?

The first thing to make clear is that, normally, religious education is underfunded by the state. Another surprising data point we found in our study is that schools budget less than 50-euro cents per year per student towards religious education. So we can say that the state does not spend much on religious education.

The dilemma is whether it is a state obligation or not. I think so. A state-funded educational system must finance education for all. If part of education is to keep the people religiously literate, which is different from turning them into believers, then the state must fund it.

The state must finance religious education mainly because everyone needs a religious education in order to live in a complex society like the contemporary one.