As Western societies experience increasing secularization and religious diversity, many countries—including Sweden—have adopted or supplemented religious education with broader worldview education. While this shift aims to encourage inclusivity, prevailing definitions of “worldview” remain overly focused on belief, limiting students’ capacity for what I term Critical Worldview Engagement—the ability to critically discuss sensitive, worldview-related issues—and for Personal Worldview Development—the reflective shaping of their own perspectives. In this chapter, I critique the belief-centric understanding of worldviews in Swedish educational curricula and academic literature, arguing that it inadequately prepares students for democratic participation. Instead, I propose that we expand the concept of worldview to include non-doxastic attitudes such as hope, assumption, acceptance, and trust. These belief-less attitudes are often more appropriate in navigating sensitive and controversial worldview-related issues. The chapter demonstrates how incorporating non-doxastic attitudes can enrich classroom discussions, better support students’ personal growth, and strengthen the democratic aims of education. Though I center my attention on Sweden, the discussion is relevant to international scholarship on worldview education as well.

In order to include all outlooks and perspectives on the world prevalent in contemporary society, countries like Sweden have replaced traditional religious education with worldview education. However, current worldview theory fails to make justice to two important facts concerning the contemporary religious landscape. Firstly, a great many people are semi-secular rather than traditional believers or atheists. Secondly, many have non-doxastic attitudes such as hope or acceptance instead of belief. We therefore suggest that worldview education needs to include semi-secularity, and that it needs to clearly separate the content of a worldview from the variety of epistemic attitudes a person might have towards that content.

Poetry can contribute to theological and philosophical reflection. In this paper, we concentrate our attention on Esaias Tegnér’s poignant depiction of melancholy, or what we call ‘existential suffering’ in his poem Spleen. We argue the poem can be interpreted as showing that the distinction between theoretical and existential problems of suffering is less clear-cut than often presupposed and that theorizing about the meaning of suffering can have a role to play even when people are experiencing great existential suffering and despair. Based on the speaker’s existential struggles in Spleen we also formulate the novel concept of a ‘hopeful theodicy’, a concept we think can be of use more broadly in future research on problems of suffering and theodicy

Proponents of religious non-doxasticism standardly aim to show how a commitment to traditional religion can be rational in the absence of religious belief. We demonstrate how the non-doxastic framework can be given a much wider application. In a study on Swedish semi-secularity, sociologist Ann af Burén has discovered a pattern where subjects simultaneously entertain naturalistic and supernatural explanations of extraordinary events. We reject Burén's interpretation of these people as irrational and compartmentalized and offer a contrasting non-doxastic reading in which the subjects involved are fully rational in their belief-less engagement with significant supernatural possibilities.

Agnostics as well as theists should answer evidential arguments from evil, at least when confronted with them. In this paper, I answer such an argument by appealing to sceptical agnosticism. A sceptical agnostic is not only undecided about the existence of a perfectly good and omnipotent God, but also believes that we cannot make any judgement about whether or not seemingly gratuitous evil probably is gratuitous. I argue that such agnosticism has several advantages compared with sceptical theism.