Week 8- Erin Yen

This week’s topic is about “Spirit realm in Academia: A movement for spiritual liberation.” Whether spirituality should be in academia is an interesting question. I believe the core reason why it is not generally considered in the academia because of its controversy. I think people have different religious beliefs and therefore have a different interpretation of spirituality. If spiritual activity or soul can be easily proved without causing interpretation variety, then there would be no controversy on this topic because everyone would be on the same page. However, the existence of spirituality, proved by science or not, is clearly extremely difficult to become a proven fact that does not have interpretation variety. For example, some people believe people who perform spiritual activities are just mentally ill or delusional. When a person told others how he saw a dead relative's soul last night, many people would just think he was too tired and therefore had malfunction in his brain. However, there are some more religious event that seem to be more convincing but scary, such as exorcism. When people witness such religious activities, they became more convinced the existence of spirituality. However, even having the belief of existence of spirituality, we face the same question: what to believe? Variety in interpretation are still too diverse. In short, I believe the difficulty of proving spirituality without causing diversity of interpretation is the core reason why most academia finds spirituality a controversial topic.

Question: Why is spirituality a controversy topic in academia?