Evolving a public language of spirituality for transforming academic and campus life

Abstract

A growing interest in spirituality in higher education has been accompanied by a range of responses to the challenge of defining the term. These responses include avoiding the problem by leaving it undefined; stipulating a particular and often context-specific definition of spirituality; and practising a kind of ad hoc eclecticism. This article promotes the project of creating a conceptual framework that would serve as a ‘public language’ of spirituality for scholar-practitioners who may not share a common religious, philosophical, political, and/or cultural tradition. In the first section, we present and account for the criteria we believe a conceptual framework must meet to serve as a public language of spirituality. In the second section, we draw from Ken Wilber’s integral theory to bring forth distinctions that we believe will be useful in facilitating this project. We conclude with suggestions for further work to advance this project within higher education.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.