Sacred and Secular Sex Ed

Historicizing the Debate Over Ontario’s Sex Education Curriculum

Roxanne Korpan

Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

The implementation of revisions made to the sexual education curriculum in Ontario’s public schools in 2015 was met with vocal opposition by a range of parents’ alliances and religious groups. In Canadian newsmedia, the lines of such debates have been drawn along a division between religious, conservative, and moral opposition to the curricular content and secular, progressive, health-based support for the revisions. This project undertakes historical excavation of the relationship between religion and sexual education in Canada to denaturalize these divisions, and asks how this history might inform contemporary debates concerning sexual education and accommodation of religious and cultural diversity.

For Sites of Memory workshop participants — read more (password protected)

With the support of the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation, Dr. Pamela Klassen of the University of Toronto and Prof. Dr. Monique Scheer, Director of the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut of Historical and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen, are directing a research project on Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies. The project runs from 2015 to […]

How Should We Understand Indigenous Spirituality (in English)? A reflection on the philosophy of listening Indigenous spirituality matters to Indigenous peoples. In this discussion, I am broadly interested in how Indigenous spirituality is used in contemporary Indigenous politics. More specifically, I ask the question: How should we understand Indigenous spirituality in English? My discussion involves […]