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Abstract
Rather than choosing between either catholic identity, or openness to otherness, the catholic dialogue school envisages, through the dialogue with the other, to stir the (re)discovery of one’s own identity, and to introduce once again the Christian voice within the conversation. After introducing this project, I reflect more extensively on how to bring this Christian voice into this intended dialogue. In distinguishing between the content of faith (fides quae) and the attitude of faith (fides qua), I develop how both these dimensions are continuously related to one another, and this in an anthropological as well as a theological way.
Notes on the contributor
Lieven Boeve is Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, Belgium. Since 2014, he is also the Director-General of the office for Catholic Education in Flanders (Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen). In 2015 he was appointed Honorary Professor at the Australian Catholic University.
Notes
1 With the term post-secular is meant that the secularisation theory no longer suffices to explain the changes which happened to the European religious landscape: rather than becoming fully areligious or secular, the relation of individuals and society to religion changed. At the same time the pluralisation of religion has become an important feature of our context. For a more extended explanation, see Boeve Citation2007b, chapter 1.
2 Pollefeyt and Bouwens (Citation2014, 53–54) distinguish between four negative effects when one continues to use Christian values education in a cultural context characterised by detraditionalisation and pluralisation: ineffectiveness, predictability, counterproductivity and an erosion of the specifically Christian aspects of school identity.
3 The models of the colourful and colourless school referred to in this paragraph I borrow from Pollefeyt and Bouwens Citation2014, 60–68. See also Pollefeyt and Bouwens Citation2010.
4 Reconfessionalisation stands for the deliberate option, in a context of secularisation, to propagate an exclusively Catholic identity of the school and thus to organise education from Catholics for Catholics (Boeve Citation2016, 161–162).
5 As I further developed in Boeve Citation2014 and Citation2015, we might understand God’s active involvement in history in terms of interruptive love, opening up our closed narratives of complacency and sin. God’s interruptive love then may become a reading key, not only to reread Scripture, but also to reflect on the presence of Christians in our society. Interrupted by God’s love, Christians are called to interrupt on God’s behalf, in situations of closedness, oppression, indifference.
6 Part of this Christian anthropological understanding of dialogue is that also people of other faiths and convictions might be able to mobilise, from their own resources, deep dialogical attitudes which share in (some of) the family resemblances of a relational anthropology. As a matter of fact, looked upon from the side of society, the Catholic dialogue school hopes to generate, not in despite of the differences, but by dealing with these within the dialogue, such communalities which might enable people of different faiths and convictions to contribute to an open, more just, tolerant and sustainable society.
7 As is evident for education as a whole, the nature of this reflexivity of course depends on the age and competences of the pupil. At the same time, practicing dialogue and generating reflexive and communicative competences, may already start in primary school. Also there, the dialogue with the other makes pupils more conscious of their own positions, and in need of language and skills to enter into conversation.