Week 8-Tony Tran

I tried to focus on thinking about the issue of spirituality not being a focus in the academy. Personally, I logically see why spirituality is not within the realm of the university. It is a vast region which has different meanings with people all around the world. Having a first class education on spirituality would mean research of “indigenous” people. What I’d like to notice is that this would shift the power from the university to the indigenous group in a sense. What I mean is that these “lesser groups” undermine the university’s knowledgeability in spirituality even though the university is the elite place of knowledge. In any case, the university wants us, the ethnic minorities, the unknown cultures to go to them, to beg them to teach things that are a fundamental part in every society. Like how the author’s grandfather in the “Spiritually in the academy...” article states that he could not see a world in which there was no sense of meaning or purpose without a divine reality. Now there is still a huge proportion of the global population that still has a spiritual faith. Thus I kinda come back to the question about why spirituality is not in the academia? I feel that the post-colonial ideal education separates education in the academia and spirituality in the church or clubs/groups. This seems to obviously work for the western societies; however, once other societies started coming in, there has been resistance to change that allows spirituality to integrate into the academia. I feel that this is a missed opportunity for cultures to meet with each other and educate both sides.

One other thing I’d like to glance over is how university research doesn’t focus on spiritual-related research for a fundamental reason. I recently learned how research papers fundamentally have P-values. These P-values enable research to have significance. For example, an animal can be 60% bigger than its control group individuals; however, if it is still P>0.05 for some reason, then the experimental group is not significant and the research isn’t too revolutionary. But back to the issue, spirituality cannot be compared, numericalize, become statistics, and have P-value significance. Thus, this is another potential element within a research-based academia could hinder the progression of integrating spirituality into the academia.

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Created this myself just to provoke thoughts (Tony)