Racial Diversity and Social Cohesion in South African Theological Education
Naidoo, Marilyn
In our post-apartheid South African society, church denominations have gone
through the process of reformulating their identity and have restructured
theological education for all its members resulting in growing multi-cultural
student bodies. These new student constituencies reflect a wide spectrum of
cultural backgrounds, personal histories, and theological commitments and
represent the diversity in race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, age and sexual
orientation. The articulation of diversity and how people experience it is often
highly charged simmering with all sorts of resentments and half-understandings.
These issues of diversity are theologically complicated and contested as
they are attached to religious dogma. Diversity exists as a threat and promise,
problem and possibility. This article is a discussion on the idea of diversity and
the management of racial diversity in theological education showing that it has
real potential in offering a Christian intervention towards social cohesion in
post-apartheid South Africa.
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