23 Teaching and the Art of Living Together I especially among Christian teachers and schools when they see the implicit socialising processes they learned to reckon with interrupted by it (12). I choose, however, to view diversity and complexity as a reality that needs to be taken into account in the education of children and, as a consequence, in the education of their teachers. Thus, I do not choose to speak of today’s world as post-Christian (Delsol, 2021) or secular (Taylor, 2007). Although these predicates are certainly not untrue, they convey, especially for Christian teachers, a certain degree of fatalism, a melancholy clinging to a past that has already faded away. In this way, they may implicitly and unwillingly foster an attitude of resistance. Both terms could, therefore, generate impediments to engagement in the task of building bridges between family and society. Other predicates used to describe society as it is in the 21st century include pluralistic (Dahl, 1978) and intercultural (Cantle, 2013). Importantly, where postChristian and secular, especially from a Christian perspective, have negative connotations, plural or pluralistic moves in the opposite direction. While pluralism is certainly a key feature of modern society (13), I do not opt for that qualification because its positivity may very well overlook the super-complexity associated with super-diversity. The predicate intercultural, which was proposed by Cantle (2013) as an alternative to multicultural, seems particularly interesting for this study, as it articulates the societal challenges for education in a detailed way, which is why it will form part of the present study. The problem with this predicate is, however, that it—just like super-diversity and super-complexity— may present a proper description of the status quo but does not describe or evaluate the underlying tendencies, such as societal fracturation or even atomisation. By contrast, a predicate that does so is fragmented. It comes from the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (2007) and concerns the loss of a former sense of interconnectedness or interwovenness. MacIntyre used the example of a fragmentation bomb that, after the Enlightenment project, left only severed fragments of the classical account of morality, deprived from their sense-giving context (‘of that context and of that justification’, as he stated in his introduction). A coherent context in which different components are mutually interconnected is a strong context, as it assigns meaning to the 12 MacMullen (2007) recognised that seeking ‘the balance between cultivation and indoctrination may be difficult to define’ (p. 24), but opposed what he sees many liberal democracies do—namely, limiting religious education to liberal civic standards. At this point, he even referred to ‘the civic case against religious schools’ (MacMullen, 2007, p. 20). 13 Mouw and Griffioen (1995) distinguished directional, contextual and associational pluralism, among which this study finds the former (directional pluralism) especially interesting.
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