In Search of Interreligious Competence: An Empirical Study in the Context of Training Caregivers Through Religious Education

Given the increasingly diverse and multi-religious character of contemporary societies in Europe and beyond, interreligious education has come to attract more and more interest. This is especially true for the field of religious education. This article comes from a research project that has two aspects as its focus. The first aspect refers to the question of whether approaches to interreligious education really are effective. The other aspect concerns what is called the meaning of interreligious abilities or competence for professional qualification. The process of training future caregivers includes both of these aspects. Moreover, the project entailed an attempt to test a number of religious-education teaching units empirically for their effects on the trainees. In this article, an attempt is made to shed light on the structure of interreligious competence. The main focus is on finding a general factor of interreligious competence at the heart of more specific facets of competence.