228 Chapter 7 children. Moreover, critical openness means ‘to have a disposition to form and revise one’s views in the light of evidence and argument’ (Thiessen, 1993, p. 163) and critically open people are ‘tolerant of others who hold viewpoints different from their own, listen to people who express differing viewpoints, and consider objections to their own viewpoints’ (p. 164). The latter aspect renders it different from ‘blind faith in tradition or authority’ (p. 164), which reflects the tension that can be perceived between faithfulness and openness. To declare both critical, as the conversational community did (see Chapter 6.1.1), presents this research with the challenge of paying close attention to this tension and responding to Thiessen’s (1993) statement that, specifically, the Enlightenment ideas of autonomy, rationality and critical openness need to be modified if they are to be both realistic and philosophically defensible. Only in this way, claimed Thiessen (1993), can it be shown that confessional religious education without indoctrination is possible. How to handle absolute truth was not immediately a focus of attention for the conversational community. Rather, it became an issue after some time, when it was put on the agenda to be considered separately. At the time, the conversational community had investigated the topic of personhood formational practices and discussed the basic attitude necessary for trainee teachers to adopt towards a modern, fragmented society. In a certain way, the topic of truth handling was already present at the start of the TAR when the baseline survey results were discussed, albeit not in a clear agenda-setting sense. One of the first reactions to the survey report came from a member of the outsider group who was affected by an open student reaction supposing that an open admissions policy on the part of Christian schools and the presence of children from other sociocultural backgrounds corresponded to ‘a more progressive, open vision of the faith in school personnel and staff’. To this suggestion, the outsider group member responded as follows: There would thus be a sliding scale and tension between opening up and maintaining one’s own religious identity. In practice, these fears are not unfounded either, although there is certainly no question of automatism. All this triggers because it shouldn’t be this way. Going wholeheartedly for one’s faith and being meaningful in the neighbourhood can go hand in hand. Our schools are examples of how you can maintain your Christian identity, even at a school where 90 percent of the student population do not share your identity. Throughout the TAR process, it gradually became clearer to the conversational community why DCU students suffered a certain anxiety about losing
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