Caught Between Faith and Faithfulness in a Knowledge Building Community: Constructing Religious Identity in a Technologically Enhanced Learning Environment

Religious education navigates a tension between learning about religion as an object of inquiry and learning from it as a lived horizon. While educational technologies can support critical inquiry, their ontological impact on traditional students remains under-examined. This linguistic ethnography of an Israeli high school student reveals that the Knowledge Forum, a sophisticated learning technology, successfully scaffolded “faith” (modernist abstraction) but lacked the scripts to support “faithfulness” (relational negotiation). These findings suggest that digital tools can inadvertently privilege modernist epistemologies, underscoring the need for learning environments designed to scaffold not only critique, but also negotiation and belonging.