245 Relational Epistemology and the Art of Living Together 7 talked about how adamant you can be as a Christian teacher with all kinds of non-Christian children in your class. So that balance… • (Non-)judging – absolute truth (five co-occurrences). Example: That reminds me of a meeting at DCU with some Roman Catholic fathers. Then, we were warmly welcomed into a Catholic environment and those people told us what good deeds caused them to follow Jesus, and by now, they had the entire Heidelberg Catechism slapped around their ears by the students. That was pretty sad, that you have such a hard time connecting with those who are different from you. All the while you have the responsibility for forming children. • Dependency – absolute truth (three co-occurrences). Example: I cannot convince them, but at the same time, from your conviction, you are praying for them. I think we can also take that into diversity in all things. Because that is the entrance. And in the end, it is God Himself who convinces. The final quotation reveals how the conversational community found a way of handling the tension between critical faithfulness (and its theology of mission) and critical openness (and its theology of respect) in an attitude of dependence (a theology of humbleness). It can be seen that all of these elements have a relation to the Biblical keyword love. Although love, as a code, does not appear in the minutes and transcriptions of meetings 11–14 more than two times, it does so in other meetings, even in connection to (non-)judging and respect. In meeting five, a teacher–student duo stated that studying the Biblical concept of shalom helps them to ‘be in the city without judgment. You do not try to measure other people but try to shine something of love, trying to be a place of shalom’. In meeting 15, the outsider team stated that, in a pedagogy of longing, ‘the accent lies on love, attention and respect’. In the central 13th meeting, which was dedicated to absolute truth, love appeared one time in relation to knowing. This was when a student explained how she likes to handle knowing as a personal thing pertaining to a relationship: Suppose, I have a sister. And suppose, we love each other very much. Yes, I love my sister very much and can tell you a lot about that. I can make it completely clear to you that this is what she looks like, this is what she can do normally. But if you don’t really see her and don’t really speak to her, then you don’t really get to know her. And then, as a teacher, you do try to get everybody—yes, it is, of course, a flawed example—but to get everybody excited to start asking more questions and to start looking, but the real work of getting to know, you can leave that. I can’t do that myself either. But just do your job.
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