Week 8: Christina Lukban

In the reading "Spirituality in the academy: Reclaiming from the margins and evoking a transformative way of knowing the world" by Riyah Ahmed Shahjahan, we discuss this week's theme of the movement for spiritual liberation through the spirit realm in academia. Connecting this theme and relating it back to my own personal life, I can see how spirituality is never even acknowledged or integrated at all into my education. But why? Having classes such as this class and a few of my anthropology classes that only briefly mentions any sort of spirituality are very rare and as I go on taking these classes, I realize more and more how important it is to be able to incorporate spirituality into my own life and the significance in spirituality being provided into our education system in general. The reading opened my eyes more to how much our education system has been constructed to be a system that is not to learn to better our lives as humans, but framed to turn people "into robots" (pg.20). In the reading, Shahjahan discusses spirituality keeping people grounded and interconnected with everything around us. It is a form of healing and utmost importance for our lives but with our education system ridding us from this and framing our education curriculum in such a way that deprives us from having this sort of spiritual liberation, we lose this critical knowledge of centering ourselves and what it means to be human. Knowledge is power and living in our capitalistic society of constant suppression and closed-minded, selfish thinking, how can we truly find ourselves if were not taught this?