Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

ng developed, and one of its ‘timbers’, in Toulmin’s sense, is going to be an anti-reductionist, systems account of reality in general. We must be prepared to enter into this new way of thinking and help all of our students to understand it. Dr Nancey Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary and a Research Professor at IBTS. New Inspirations and Religious Education in Poland 17 New Inspirations and Religious Education in Poland: The Process Perspective 1 Polish society is quite unusual as far as cultural identity is concerned. What I mean is, first of all, the monolithic religious context compared to other European societies. Secondly, in the last several years a big economic emigration was noticed, especially to Great Britain and Ireland which forced many Poles to interact with other cultures and religions. My assumption is that symbols and structures shaped by religious beliefs, to a great extent, influence the structure of traditional societies. Poland still belongs to this group in spite of rapid changes that occurred after the political shift in 1989 and especially after joining the European Union. The research, the results of which are presented in this paper, is based on the phenomenographic approach 2 and was accomplished in June and July 2007 among teachers of religion in Gdansk secondary schools (where more than 90% of students attend lessons in religion provided by churches within the grounds of the public schools). I was interested in their readiness and ability to shift from one theological state to another - so the research is about the dynamics in the sphere of religious conceptualisation and its connection to the present sociopolitical situation in Poland. It also deals with the relationship between teaching and learning in the processes of religious socialisation. Among the respondents there were twenty teachers of the Roman Catholic religion and fifteen teachers of other religions (including Christian denominations: Polish National Catholic, Greek Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Pentecostal, Adventist churches, as well as other religions: Islam, Buddhism and Judaism), all teaching in gymnasiums (Polish middle schools with students aged 13-16). Interviews were held in schools in which religion is taught or in educational facilities run by parishes. Roman Catholic respondents were selected randomly while the group of teachers of other religions - because of their minority status - practically included the whole population. This paper reflects on one out of twelve groups of questions that were asked in the research. In the phenomenographic procedure, the following categories of meanings assigned by teachers to the examined phenomena were isolated: 1 This paper has been written as part of the project Discursive construction of the subject in selected areas of contemporary culture, carried out in 2007-2010 in the Institute of Pedagogy of the Univer