Abstract

Questions about the effectiveness of Religious Education methods were raised in a qualitative study of the role of the imagination in the religious conversion of adolescents attending Catholic secondary schools in Western Australia. Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to interpret the data from that study to show how the participants constructed their beliefs about God and how they positioned themselves in relation to discourses involving family, school and Church. The conclusions drawn from the analysis are in harmony with the general thrust of New Evangelisation and point to the need to develop a Religious Education pedagogy that is relational.