301 Conclusion and Discussion 10 10.1 CORE COMPONENTS: A PRACTICE-THEORY The world we live in is a fractured world. This has been the case, as I argued in Chapter 1, since the introduction of sin to God’s originally good and whole creation. In our late-modern times, however, we witness an increase in it, which is aptly characterised by Alasdair MacIntyre’s (2007) predicate of modernity as fragmented. As a result of rapid changes in both the natural and the social worlds (the Great Acceleration and Great Transformation), we now face high societal diversity and complexity (super-diversity and super-complexity). In this study, I investigated how to handle these developments, not considering them as threats but as interrelated challenges that call for a broad, coherent educational response. From a Christian perspective, this implies a holistic Christian response that does justice to the stratified problem of fragmentation. Christian, because the study proved that religion, for both the participants in the TAR and the broad DCU student population, forms the deepest motivation to be in education and to connect to the world. Holistic, because any intention to foster social cohesion without taking into account wholeness or the whole is bound to fail—because it only addresses a part of the problem, sometimes at the cost of another part. This leads to an answer to the first sub-question as formulated in the introduction (Section 3) to this dissertation: What are the challenges of a fragmented society that confront Christian citizenship formation on both the intrapersonal and interpersonal (social and cultural) levels? To phrase this answer, I will return to Chapter 1, where I illustrated the layered problem of fragmentation with this conceptual scheme: Conceptual scheme of fragmentation and subjectification Level Structure Threat–Outcome Response Direction to take Macro: World Ordered framework Disintegration– alienation Communicating frameworks Relational epistemology Meso: Society Peaceful coexistence Atomisation– detachment Healing civic allegiances Heavenly politeuma Micro: Person Relational flourishing Alienation– atomisation (Re)connecting persons Personhood as communion FRAGMENTATION SUBJECTIFICATION
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