179 Preliminary WCD Reception at Driestar Christian University 5 our neighbourhood? Do we know in concrete terms what it means to live as Christians in a postmodern and thoroughly secular society? (p. 6) What Büdgen emphasised before DCU’s identity resonance group can be seen as a specific problem for personhood and citizenship formation from a Reformed Christian perspective. On the one hand, there is a wish to contribute to social cohesion on the level of society, to prepare students and teachers to connect with it, accepting in the process that the own position has now become that of a small minority in need of subjectifying elements for its formational processes. On the other hand, there is a considerable concern regarding what such a contribution—inviting students to connect to society’s cultural, ethnical and religious diversity—might do to their socialisation processes and the traditional reliance on them that has characterised Reformed education in the Netherlands from the start. In terms of Chapter 1’s fragmentation thesis, the question that presented itself at DCU was: should an accent on personhood as communion (on intersubjectivity) include or exclude people with fundamentally different cultural and religious views than one’s? In terms of WCD (Chapter 2) and especially its evaluation from the perspective of Christian anthropology (Chapter 3): is a fruitful combination of inward and outward connectivity possible without losing one’s theological approach? The introduction to this dissertation already referred (in Section 1) to the sociologist Peter Berger and his (1999) theory on plausibility structures as socialising structures. Berger concluded that the inevitable penetration of these structures, to which social pillars can be reckoned, would in pluralistic societies not necessarily lead to the secularisation of all groups. Gorski and Guhin (2017) distinguished between endogenous pluralism (internal, within the social group) and exogenous pluralism (caused by globalisation), stating that ‘while endogenous pluralism may indeed weaken or fragilize “plausibility structures”, exogenous pluralism often leads to a deepening, sharpening, and hardening of beliefs’ (p. 1124). They added that religious subgroups such as the American evangelicals amidst a pluralistic society have often ‘created their own closed sub-universes of meanings and thereby stored up traditional “plausibility structures”, albeit in a more fragmented form and on a smaller scale’ (Gorski & Guhin, 2017, p. 1124). Others, again in the context of the Netherlands, have argued that the formation of a strong identity is actually helpful in accepting and adjusting to high levels of diversity. De Wolff (2006) and MacMullen (2004) both found proof that a strong personal identity formation stimulates students to approach others with openness and respect. Investigating the practice of several Reformed Christian primary schools in the Netherlands, de Muynck (2008)
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