Week 8 - Kenrick Chiang

In this week's reading, "“Spiritually in the Academy: Reclaiming from the Margins and Evoking aTransformative Way of Knowing the World," the article focused on a lot of ideas revolving around spirituality in academia. The author presents an interesting question which is "why is spirituality marginalized in the academy?" Throughout the reading, the author is searching for this answer and the connection of spirituality with Western academy. I personally thought that the author did a really good job good job tying these ideas of how Western academia shapes different conditions that restrict spirituality. Another topic that I noticed that the author wanted to touch upon was seeing how spirituality shaped our way of learning and knowing. Even though that there are a lot of steps that need to be taken in order to understand these questions and spirituality itself, I felt like it did a good job setting up the foundations of this research. I thought that this reading did a good job connecting with themes within our class. We see that spirituality is essentially looked down upon in Western medicine and how people think it is "weird" or "strange." This reading tackles a similar idea in which spirituality is questioned in the field of academia. We are also able to see more connections with these in class in the sense that spirituality is a good stepping stone in these different fields of work that can help us get closer to a better understanding of spirituality as a topic. I thought that this article did a good job connecting to the themes of this week as well which was the spirit realm in academia. Because of the fact that this reading tackles the ideas of how spirituality is treated in academia, we are able to get a better sense on what could be improved upon. This in turn could lead to spiritual liberation through the sense of a better understanding.