From AI and climate action to religious education and teacher training, we’ve new research to share, courtesy of Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum.
Read on for summaries of new articles on diverging accounts of time in the climate movement, the importance of eclecticism in religious education, the perils and promise of reflexive writing, and (see featured image above) a second installment on Human-like Dialogue Agents from Daniel Weiss & Darren Frey.
The time for climate action
Last month, Dr Tobias Müller (CRASSH) published an analysis of how Extinction Rebellion activists talk about time. To put it succinctly, highlighting a “climate emergency” makes people focus on the immediate future. That’s allied with a Western perspective in which the true challenges of climate change are pushed into the future. For those in parts of the world where climate change is already a major threat to human life, and where this often sits alongside other inequalities related to colonisation and difficult pasts, the rebellion is part of a continuum with previous efforts at systems change. In this configuration, “decolonial time” attends to ways the past shapes the present.
Getting to grips with these divergent constructs of and attention to time, Müller highlights possibilities for climate action to resonate with both past and future. While the two temporalities direct attention differently, they can be yoked together effectively. Action scheduled to coincide with the 230th anniversary of the Haitian Revolution offers a concrete example of that potential.
Müller explains:
“the protest at the Guildhall on the anniversary of the Haitian Revolution combined the temporalities of movement time by initiating a two-week international climate protest campaign, of historical time considering 500 years of anti-colonial resistance, of deep atmospheric time charting climate breakdown and of capitalist time tracking global trade in the City of London.”
Read Müller’s article: Political theories of climate temporality (via journals.sagepub.com).
Dialogue with the non-human?
Professor Daniel Weiss has published the second in a pair of cowritten articles together with Dr Darren Frey (Sciences Po Paris). Weiss and Frey first met on the Masters programme at Harvard Divinity School in 2004. Frey moved into cognitive psychology, while Weiss continues to probe the breadth of Jewish philosophy and texts. Together they ask about the risks and realities as more people engage with human-like dialogue agents (HDAs) such as ChatGPT.
It feels like dialogue with an extremely empathetic partner, and yet the reality is there is no second person involved. Their first piece (in the Harvard Data Science Review) raised initial concerns about one-person dialogue. The latest (in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin) invokes scriptural precedent: HDAs are considered in the context of prohibitions against “other gods” and the threat to human wellbeing when non-human objects are endowed with godlike powers.
“To relate in a personal manner to that which . . . cannot actually see, hear, or know you in a personal way, will lead to harmful or deadening effects, not life-enriching or soul-affirming ones.”—Weiss & Frey
Read Suprahuman but Inhuman Gods? at bulletin.hds.harvard.edu.
This week has brought two new Education papers:
Staying eclectic
Daniel Moulin leads initial teacher training for Religious Studies at Cambridge. In the Oxford Review of Education, he argues for the diversity of approaches to religious education as essential to a pluralist learning context. In this, Moulin extrapolates from the principles of Joseph Schwab, an education theorist who supplied a critical mode (“the Practical”) to the recent review of England’s school curriculum.
Schwab, Moulin alerts the reader, was Jewish and had a Jewish sensibility embodied in his concept of “the Eclectic”. (A key reference point here is Alan Block’s 2004 study of Schwab: Talmud, Curriculum and the Practical.) Adopting an eclectic mode, exposing learners and teachers to different theories and approaches, counteracts the risk of partiality or bias. In constructing the “crisis” of Religious Education as susceptible to a single theoretical solution, stakeholders risk casting out the pluralism that accompanies the eclectic.
“There can be no general and all-encompassing approach that frames RE in a secular world because any all-encompassing theoretical approach that renders a particular epistemology is, for want of a better word, a particular religious position.”—Moulin
Read Moulin’s argument in full and learn more about the relevance of Schwab to school-based Religious Education (via TAndFOnline.com).
Between personal, professional and pedagogical
Writing in English in Education, Cambridge PhD student Maryam Bham registers the significance of reflective journalling as a component of her Teach First training. A required element of the two-year in-class scheme, reflective writing had benefits and costs.
As a Muslim, Bham situates her journalling within traditions of knowledge preservation, deep understanding, and the nurture of self-awareness. Yet as she chronicled and reflected on specific professional experiences, the journalling constituted emotionally taxing labour. More than that, the act of recording microaggressions triggered others to respond, making future decisions about what to journal feel risky and political. Ultimately, Bham went on to embrace the political dimension, supported by an effective mentor and identifying how she could build her own pedagogical practice as someone advocating for greater access and inclusion.
“Journaling became a space to reclaim my narrative in a system that often demands conformity. For teachers from marginalised backgrounds, such reflective spaces play an important role: they help surface inequities, name lived experiences, resist erasure, assert agency, and reimagine education as a space of inclusion and empowerment.”—Bham
Read more of Bham, Writing myself into teaching (via TAndFOnline.com).
Articles discussed:
- Bham, M. 2025 Writing myself into teaching: reflective journals and the formation of a Muslim teacher identity. English in Education, 1–12. doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2025.2588259
- Frey, D & Weiss, DH. 2025 “One Person Dialogues: Concerns About AI-Human Interactions,” Harvard Data Science Review 7:2, doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.01674a29.
- Moulin, D. 2025 Using Schwab to reform the Religious Education curriculum in England. Oxford Review of Education, 1–15. doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2025.2573261
- Müller, T. 2025 Political theories of climate temporality: Extinction Rebellion, emergency time and decolonial time. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. doi.org/10.1177/13691481251371543
- Weiss, DH & Frey, D. 2025 Suprahuman but Inhuman Gods? Faith communities must critically assess relations with AI. Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Autumn/Winter 2025.
Note: Digital-first publication means that (where present) page numbers indicate length of an article without necessarily corresponding to the pagination of the relevant print issue.