This contribution has two purposes. It aims at grasping Indigenous religions with an emphasis on Maya religious discourse seen in long term perspective and aims to give examples of how teaching about ecology, sustainability and global ethics and values can benefit from connecting to Indigenous religious traditions rituals within Religious Education. Questions of powerful knowledge and religious literacy are also discussed in this context.

Central themes in Maya cosmology, mythology and rituals will be highlighted together with the viability of Maya view on nature, agriculture, ecology and thus sustainability. Local knowledge of agriculture and ethnobotany, as well as ritual healing ceremonies are handed down from ancient traditions and still visible in present everyday life. These ritual practices today still communicate meaning and spirituality in the Maya area.

Knowledge of Indigenous religions and spirituality, exemplified by the case of Maya cosmology and ritual practices, will deepen understanding of processes of change and permanence and thus of sustainability. The objective is to emphasise the importance of integrating questions of sustainability and ecology in RE classrooms and to encourage future teachers in RE to develop their knowledge on the relations between religion(s) and sustainability.

In the context of humanistic Bildung-centred Didaktik, the educational potential of different school subjects is emphasized. But how can different school subjects collectively contribute to the ‘cultivation-of-human-powers’ and Bildung with a focus on sustainability? In this article, seven different school subjects are compared. Eleven teacher educators from Malmö University, Sweden, have written scholarly about the roles of their respective school subjects for Bildung and sustainability. Drawing from the texts related to the seven school subjects – geography, mathematics, physical education and health, religious education, science for citizenship, Swedish as a second language, and visual arts – a comparative analysis was conducted. The primary focus was to understand the unique characteristics of each school subject, explore their epistemic differences, and discern their potential roles in fostering cross-curricular didactics for Bildung and sustainability. It is shown that the different school subjects collectively provide complementary contributions to contemporary Bildung and climate change literacy.

How can a secular democratic state inform its fundamental values to migrants with past affiliation in societies marked by religious norms and values? In Sweden, migrants are offered a (non-compulsory) course in civic orientation. Research has shown a need for professionalization of this type of education. A dimension of professionalization can, we urge, be described in terms of religious literacy. The development of a course in civic orientation, where norms and values are discussed with respect to human rights, presupposes that methods are developed to draw attention to the complexity, and the ambiguity, of relations between religious and secular ethical positions. Teachers need knowledge of religiously motivated beliefs in ethical issues and of ways in which these are made visible in the multidimensional practice of lived religion. Sweden, perceived as a highly secular country, has taken in many migrants from countries with traditional religious values. Through interviews, the Institute for Future Studies has identified some areas where religiosity is one parameter for the way these people rethink ethically relevant perceptions. These are values of self-determination and the individual’s own choices – such as abortion, divorce, premarital sex and homosexuality, and with those contiguous rights that are perceived as non-negotiable in the secular democratic discourse. This chapter analyses the secular state’s mission to inform new arrivals about democratic values in relation to human rights in the Swedish discourse. The analysis is based on a multidimensional understanding of the concept of religious literacy, with reference to a discussion about the distinction between having a right to live with or without religion. One aim is to explore challenges and opportunities to discern in the current discourse how religion can contribute to the development of the secular state and how secular value teaching can contribute to the development of religious approaches to human rights.