This study aims to examine the biblical foundation in the learning of Bible-based preschool children with a contextual learning approach. The research method used is topical research, which focuses on developing education and learning that is relevant to daily life so that children more easily absorb material according to learning goals. The learning process starts from simple things to more complex things, according to the stage of early childhood development. The results of the study show that Bible-based preschool learning includes various activities, including: educating children with a biblical foundation, introducing the Bible through number ordering, arranging the biblical alphabet, combining letters into words, arranging words into biblical phrases, reading Bible texts, memorizing short golden verses, and learning activities such as coloring and listening to Bible stories. These findings confirm that Bible-based learning with a contextual approach can be an effective strategy in shaping the spiritual, cognitive, and character foundations of preschoolers, while instilling faith values from an early age.

ABSTRACT This study explores how biblical narratives aid Catholic pastoral care for individuals with suicidal ideation in Oyo State, Nigeria. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, I interviewed 20 Catholic priests, mostly chaplains in educational, parish and healthcare settings, experienced in suicide prevention. The 90-minute semi-structured interviews were analysed using NVivo 15, revealing seven themes: perseverance, hope, divine purpose, God's compassion, mercy, redemption, and avoiding judgment. Priests used stories of Joseph, Job, Elijah, Bartimaeus, and the Prodigal Son to reframe suffering, foster hope, and affirm life's value. These narratives served as spiritual and therapeutic tools, emphasizing God's presence. The study highlights biblical stories as vital for culturally sensitive suicide prevention in pastoral care, cautioning against judgmental attitudes. Findings suggest implications for pastoral training and mental health support in faith communities, promoting compassionate care strategies.

This paper explores performance criticism as an emerging hermeneutical tool within biblical studies, emphasizing its relevance in the context of digital storytelling. It highlights the ancient oral traditions that shaped biblical texts, arguing that the Bible evolved through storytelling, public readings, and performances. This study underscores the constitutive, epistemic, and critical dimensions of story performance. Through oral performances, biblical stories convey emotional depth and cultural resonance, engaging audiences with their communal and contextual relevance. The text delves into the interplay between performer and audience, illustrating how memory, emotion, and embodiment enhance storytelling. It argues that ancient scribes, far from being mere transcribers, were active participants in preserving and reshaping the stories for their communities. By engaging with the performative nature of biblical texts, Performance Criticism offers a dynamic interpretative framework that integrates historical, rhetorical, and social analyses. Furthermore, the paper advocates for re-appropriating biblical storytelling as a powerful communication paradigm in contemporary faith contexts. The rediscovery of memorization and internalization enriches the performance, fostering holistic engagement that connects mind, body, and spirit. By emphasizing storytelling’s transformative potential, the study proposes it as a medium to renew biblical communication and influence cultural paradigms. This hermeneutical approach bridges the gap between ancient oral traditions and modern interpretative needs, making biblical narratives more accessible, engaging, and relevant in today’s digital and post-literate culture. Performance Criticism thus emerges as a vital tool for re-imagining biblical communication in ways that resonate across time and cultures.

This study looks at how the Contextual Teaching and Learning (CTL) model is used in Christian Religious Education (CRE) and checks how it helps students develop their critical thinking abilities. In today’s education system, students are not just expected to remember Bible stories, but also to understand what they mean, think about the moral lessons, and use Christian values wisely in their everyday lives. However, past observations show that CRE classes often use a lot of lectures and memorization, which doesn’t give students much chance to think deeply or link what they learn to real-life situations. The CTL model provides a better way for learning by using seven key parts: constructivism, inquiry, questioning, learning community, modeling, reflection, and real-world assessmen. A descriptive qualitative design was employed involving CRE teachers and students selected purposively from classes that have integrated CTL in online and face-to-face settings. Data were collected through classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, and instructional documents. The analysis followed Miles and Huberman’s stages of data reduction, display, and conclusion drawing, supported by triangulation to strengthen credibility. The findings reveal that CTL enhances student engagement, promotes higher-order reasoning, and supports the internalization of Christian values in real-life contexts. Supporting factors include a positive school climate, parental involvement, and teacher readiness, whereas obstacles emerge from limited facilities, large class sizes, and insufficient teacher understanding of CTL. The study underscores the need for context-based and character-oriented instructional designs in CRE.

The article discusses the ways of constructing reality through modern media. Plot features and the semiotic component in audiovisual information works allow for the transmission of universal images. The author comes to the conclusion that the archetype of Rebirth (a term coined by C.G. Jung), as well as the biblical story of salvation, underlie most news items. The results of the study contribute to the disclosure of the conceptual features of television, which impacts the viewer’s agenda and subsequent behavioral strategies.

The biblical text has been translated into images through specific visual codes throughout the history of art. This article examines this phenomenon in the case of two women from the Old Testament and their traditional representation: Rebekah and Rachel and their encounters at the well. The codification of their biblical story through shared iconographic motifs has led to confusion in their identification. The latter is demonstrated by a reinterpretation of two seventeenth-century Neapolitan paintings by Luca Giordano and Andrea Vaccaro, respectively.

Various types of impact, assimilation, and engagement of certain redactional layers of the Hebrew Bible with Achaemenid-era Zoroastrianism have long been noted by biblical scholars and by researchers of ancient Iranian cultic practices. Both disciplines, however, are facing similar challenges regarding the problem of the transmission history of their sacred texts, which is complex, perplexing, and vigorously debated. Thus, due caution must be taken when considering latent echoes of one tradition within the corpus of the other. The following article focuses on one particular, intricate, and very well-known biblical story often associated to various degrees with the so-called “P(riestly) source”—namely, the “Call of Moses” (CoM) in the initial portions of the famous scene at the “Burning Bush” on Mt. Horeb (here defined as Exod 2:23–3:15)—examined in relation to Achaemenid-era Zoroastrianism. I begin with an assessment of the relevant cultic elements that can be securely dated to that timeframe or to its later evolution—especially those that can be shown to have impacted Yahwists at the time. This preliminary study then serves as a foundation to examine the passage in question in a more systematic manner. The conclusion points to a deep familiarity and assimilation of Zoroastrian fire veneration practices by the Priestly author/redactor.

The Book of Esther between Judaism and Christianity: The Biblical Story, Self-identification, and Antisemitic Interpretation, by Isaac Kalimi

The article traces 6áRZDFNL’s epistolary image and the fictional image of the hero in the poem „Anhelli“ in terms of the psychological identification with Christ. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem is an attempt to get closer to the location of the biblical story, to the sacred image, but it is also an act of empathising with and understanding the Son of God. The pair of Shaman – Anhelli functionalises aspects of the archetypes “wise old man” and “youth”. The innocent and pure chosen one acts as a bearer of the Spirit in the desert of oblivion, spiritlessness and viciousness. The multitude of exiles is present through bodily suffering and moral defects, functioning as an empty form and unrealised expression of a human community. From a place of trial and asceticism (according to Christian symbolism), the desert turns into a garden for the soul that has become aware of God’s dictum, a place where the self-sacrifice of the chosen one redeems the sins and imperfections of the exiled Poles, who have left their homes and their native land behind. In the messianic conceptualisation of Polish Romanticism the Imitacio Christi process stands out, bringing closer together poet and character in search of the ideal. In the context of the biblical story, the epic line of the poem acquires a sacred meaning for the Polish self-awareness. It outlines the concept of the link between the leader and the people, highlighting the mystic transformation of the divided multitude into a new human and communal status – a people.

Abstract This article offers a critical and appreciative response to Alister McGrath’s The Nature of Christian Doctrine , exploring the formation of doctrine as a dynamic communal process rooted in Scripture, liturgy and historical context. It highlights McGrath’s analogy between doctrinal development and scientific method, emphasising the search for a conceptual ‘best fit’ and the role of theōria as contemplative participation. The essay underscores the explanatory, identity‐forming and pastoral functions of doctrine, while arguing for the foundational role of narrative—particularly the biblical story of fall and redemption—in shaping Christian teaching, identity and spiritual life across history and cultures.

The aim of this article is to analyse the interpretation of scenes on the reverses of three coins from the Roman Empire period, originating from Phrygian Apamea. Between the 17th century and the beginning of the 20th century, three issues of these coins were known, which were made during the reign of Septimius Severus, Macrinus and Philip the Arab. The prevailing view is that the reverses of these coins present a flood scene, which refers either to the Greek myth of Deucalion or to the biblical story of Noah. In addition to these two ways of interpretation, several other explanations of this scene have been proposed. The aim of these analyses is to present these interpretations, taking into account the connections between them.

The rise of the movement propagating the abolition of the slave trade in Britain was accompanied by the increasing engagement of women in the antislavery cause. These women claimed a voice on the public stage by pointing to the fact that slavery was a domestic institution. By the early nineteenth century, family separation had become one of the most popular abolitionist tropes and it gave women an important role in the later immediatist movement that emerged in opposition to gradualism. This article deals with the evolution of the abolitionist cognitive tool “mental metempsychosis,” which was made use of to argue against family separations, by looking at religiously inspired ideas notably tied to Christian Kabbalism that challenged the concept of the heritability of slavery. These ideas were initially developed by female Nonconformist ministers to repudiate the biblical story of Eve’s transgression as justification for original sin and for women’s subjugation to men.

ABSTRACT This essay discusses six proven examples of implementing James M. Lang's small teaching philosophy from his book entitled Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (2016, 2021). I first provide a helpful summary explanation of Lang's nine research‐based principles that structure the book. Then I give new teaching examples related to some of the principles. The first set of three examples relates to the principles of belonging and motivating and includes the recommended utilization of a class seating chart, telling dramatic biblical stories, and recognizing and praising student efforts. The second set of three examples relates to the principles of connecting and explaining and includes the recommended utilization of a four‐part scriptural exegesis assignment, a presentation showing how scripture is manifested in our culture, and a metanarrative framework to organize course designs. The result was an increase in instructional effectiveness, which led to an increase in student attention, engagement, and learning.

The Benefits of Learning Media for Sunday School Students' Ability to Hear Bible Stories

Abstract Studying Arik Shapira’s 1982/2003 opera Aqedah ( Binding ), this article probes the boundaries of Shapira’s resistance to the Zionist ideological apparatus. Having set the banishment of Ishmael (Genesis 21) side by side with the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), Shapira highlighted the intricate network of correspondences between these two stories while restoring balance to Jewish victimhood, which usually excluded Ishmael in favour of politically actualising Isaac. To reflect the brutality embedded in these biblical stories (nationally appropriated or not), Shapira disintegrated the text into syllables to which he assigned mostly even durations and inert pitches; the result was a deliberately unemotional and stringent reportage, whose violent conveyance equalled its desemanticisation. Shapira’s use of musical and textual ready-mades in the third movement of Aqedah is situated here alongside an oratorio that reverences similar ready-mades, and in so doing affirms the nationalisation of the Holocaust (Noam Sheriff’s The Revival of the Dead ), and a poem by Yizhak Laor, which marks a dialectical threshold Shapira could never cross. Despite his ensnarement, Shapira’s almost vandalistic approach signalled the separation of art music from territorial nationalism.

The Book of Esther between Judaism and Christianity: The Biblical Story, Self-identification, and Antisemitic Interpretation, by Isaac Kalimi

A translator should be able to convey the intended meaning contained in the source language into the target one. The results of the initial observation depicted that some students in the translation class tended to translate without reading the whole text that might lead to misunderstanding of source text. This study aimed at analysing the problems faced by the student translators in translating the good Samaritan’s story from English language into Bahasa Indonesia. This study used a descriptive method. The participants were the 4th Year English Department students who took the course of Linguistic 3 as their major course. The data were taken from the Christian Biblical story in Luke 10:25-37. The data were analysed using a translation procedure. The results indicated that there are ten of problem found in the students’ translation, which are the improper use of generalization technique, improper of borrowing technique, missing the target language structure, meaning deletion, improper use of literal technique, context misunderstanding, target language interference, meaning addition, inability to find right equivalent, and source text misunderstanding.

The current study aims to determine the effectiveness of the Anunciata Approach (AAp) in developing four reading comprehension skills: identifying details, noting emotions, sequencing events, and making predictions. The AAp is a multiple intelligence (MI) based activity that aims to improve not only the reading comprehension skills of the students but also their familiarity with Biblical stories and the moral values they contain. To determine the effectiveness of the AAp, the kindergarten pupils at Colegio Anunciata received the AAp reading class for 30 minutes for 45 days. The data were then properly documented, methodically analysed and subjected to rigorous interpretation processes. The results revealed that the general effectiveness of the AAp is significant, with a large effect size of 0.68 in developing the four reading comprehension skills. Hence, the AAp can be highlighted as a medium for developing the four reading comprehension skills utilising the Biblical stories as a springboard and facilitated by MI-based activities. This study suggests that MI-based activities can effectively improve reading comprehension skills in young learners. Given the limited number of participants, it is recommended that this study be conducted with a larger sample size to enhance the reliability of the findings.

Learning fatigue is a serious challenge in the world of education, including in Christian Religious Education (CRE) subjects. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of active learning methods in overcoming learning fatigue among students in CRE subjects. Furthermore, it aims to provide theoretical and practical contributions to the field of basic education, particularly in formulating more adaptive, interactive, and psychologically appropriate learning approaches. This article employs a qualitative research method by analyzing the effectiveness of active learning methods as a solution to address such boredom. Active learning methods, which include strategies such as group discussions, simulations, role-playing, and project-based learning, have proven to increase students' cognitive, emotional, and social engagement. In addition to providing an enjoyable learning experience, this approach also reinforces Christian values in the context of PAK learning. This article concludes that active learning is not only capable of reducing learning boredom but also improving the quality of the learning process holistically. Therefore, teachers need to continuously develop their pedagogical and spiritual competencies to achieve transformative PAK learning that frees students from boredom. This study is expected to serve as a practical reference for teachers and policymakers in designing relevant, interactive, and contextual learning strategies. Moreover, the implementation of active learning methods in CRE subjects can also foster a deeper connection between students and the spiritual teachings of Christianity. By engaging students through hands-on activities such as role-playing biblical stories or collaborating on projects related to Christian values, students are encouraged to actively reflect on their faith in a more meaningful and personal way.

ABSTRACT The biblical origin story of Adam and Eve, known as “the Fall,” is used as the basis for an exploration of what the authors call “embodied relational knowing.” This experiential realm includes the need to be known by others, the need to know others, and the need not to know or be known. The authors review Lewis Aron’s comparison of exegesis of the story by Erich Fromm and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and compare relational knowing with the concepts of meaning and recognition. They address the ethical dangers of relational knowing with reference to Marcel Foucault’s writings on “knowledge/power.” Two illustrative clinical examples are provided.