235 Relational Epistemology and the Art of Living Together 7 pertaining to belief in absolute truth and truth-holding, on the one hand, and a longing and willingness for openness, on the other hand. For themselves, the members of the conversational community appear to have found an enduring balance between the poles of critical faithfulness and critical openness. This balance helps them to work as Christian teachers in an environment characterised by high ethnic, cultural and even religious diversity, although thinking through that balance requires active maintenance. At the same time, they realise that, for students, the search for this balance in many cases still has a way to go, which needs to be addressed with clarity in the teacher training’s personhood formation. 7.2 FOUR THEOLOGICAL VOICES ON RELATIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY From its 11th through to its 14th meeting (27 June 2022 to 7 February 2023), the conversational community spoke intensively about how students can combine adhesion to the truth claims of the Christian faith with open interaction with adherents from other (religious) perspectives. During the 11th meeting, the topic emerged in an extensive conversation about what the desired attitude of Christian teachers in a pluralistic society would be (which will be analysed in the next chapter). Respect for others, including their perspectives on what is true and false in terms of religions and life convictions, brought one member of the outsider group to a reflection on a conversation she had with a group of DCU students during a guest lecture she gave on citizenship education for children in a multi-ethnic classroom: I noticed that an open attitude is not always there yet (…) So it’s especially important that we can create that open attitude in students. And that it doesn’t always go the way you want it, maybe, but that you also have to deal with the other party. That you will have to do it together. That really stuck with me, that sometimes I was really shocked by statements about which I thought, ‘Oops, this is really still an us-they story, and not a case of we’ll take it up together’. This statement not only led to an ongoing discussion but also to the deliberate thematising of the epistemology to which the 12th and, especially, 13th meetings were dedicated. It also led, finally, in the 14th meeting, to the key moment for the entire TAR process in which the three main topics of deliberation were identified: subjectification, epistemology and attitude (see the introductory remarks in Chapter 6). In this meeting, the conversational community also identified epistemological formation as the second main topic
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