36 Introduction TAR is specifically applicable to faith-based institutions such as DCU or other institutes that are concerned about re-matching their identity with their practices and relating the two anew to the changed, secularised social context. It brings together four different theological voices—namely, the voices of normative theology, formal theology, operant theology and espoused theology. The idea behind TAR is that everything that can be said about action motivated by the Christian faith is fully theological and so needs to be taken seriously. Not only can the formal theologian bring religious truth to the table, practitioners must also be heard, even taking into account their unspoken actions. From the interaction among these four voices emerges a theology of disclosure, a new theological insight that provides for the translation of religious truth in today’s daily practice. In the case of the conversational community that applied TAR, theologically driven visions and intentions, as well as designs and practices, were brought together to achieve what this research aims to achieve: the identification of interrelated core components for a practice-theory for more holistic teacher training in relation to Christian citizenship education. A holistic approach with regard to the quest to identify working elements for the citizenship formation of Christian teachers in the context of a fragmented society, therefore, entails a constant movement between theory and practice, the use of a methodology that is both conversational and theological, and a research design that matches a paradigm of change and transformation of practice and theory, which enables the formation of a practice-theory. 5. STRUCTURE OF THE STUDY After this introduction, the theoretical part of this study will be presented in three chapters. This part is distinct but not separate from the practicalempirical part that follows in Chapters 4 to 9. However, when presented in a linear form, this study maintains the constant back-and-forth movement between vision and practice. Chapter 1 delves deeper into the challenges for citizenship formation of the world and society as fragmented wholes. It strengthens the argument for adopting MacIntyre’s (2007) predicate fragmented as a description conveying the challenges of today’s world and society. This leads to a conceptual scheme explaining the layered problem of fragmentation and some initial elements of Christian theology and pedagogy that suggest a direction to face this problem: the radical personhood theology of Zizioulas (2021), the Pauline notion of heavenly citizenship related by Zerbe (2012) to competitive civic allegiances and Beech’s (2019, 2021, 2022) relational
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