I remember when I finished my four-year undergraduate university program in North America and starting looking for a masters program to attend to and was only to find that what I was interested in, shamanism and spirituality, hardly existed as a full program offering or even as a half-semester course. As you might imagine, I never went for my masters. Now, it’s promising to know that opportunities for future knowledge seekers to explore what I wish I had in an academic setting are growing as seen in this The Vancouver Sun Blog article:
Columbia University has become the first Ivy League school in this modern era to venture into psychology and spirituality. It’s clinical psychology program is experimenting with integrating psychotherapy and spirituality in ways seldom seen at a major research university. It may be part of a trend.
It appears a few more secular universities, which have been almost phobic in their resistance to religion and spirituality in the past 50 years, are getting ready to take the subjects more seriously.
Indeed, the academic logjam of materialistic atheism seems to have been broken a couple of other times this year, with the philosophy department of the University of California, Riverside, breaking a stigma by accepting a $5 million Templeton grant to research reports of an afterlife.
As well, University of B.C. researcher Edward Slingerland is heading up a $3 million grant to study the interface of religion and morality.
And, as this week’s New York Times article about Columbia University says, there are other institutes around the U.S. that are looking at “spiritual psychology.” They include the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and Sofia University, until last month known as the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, in Palo Alto, Calif.
Here’s an excerpt from the NYT piece:
“It’s a very significant step, because outside of the faith-based training programs, these training programs related to religion and spirituality have been few and far between,” said Julie Exline, the president of a division of the American Psychological Association focused on the subject. “It helps to make the topic seem more mainstream and less fringy.”
At the same time, this kind of psychology has critics. “From my perspective, psychology must remain neutral,” said David Wulff, a past president of the same division of the American Psychological association. “With the assumption that we are inherently spiritual beings, I worry that therapists who come out of such a program are going to be approaching their clients with this expectation that they have to contact their spirituality, and I don’t know where that is going to leave some clients.”
I find Wulff’s comments peculiar. What does he mean by “neutral?” How is it “neutral” to keep religion and spirituality out of psychology; to keep it a forbidden subject? Polls continually show most North Americans are spiritually or religiously inclined. Wouldn’t they want to talk to therapists about such subjects?
(When I discovered Wulff teaches at an evangelical university, Wheaton, his emphasis on “neutrality” seems even more strange. Being willing to talk to a therapy client about spirituality doesn’t mean the therapist will impose specific beliefs — Buddhist, Christian, New Age or Hindu — on him or her. But, then again, some evangelicals are opposed to the teaching of world religions in secular schools, since it does not privilege their theologically conservative kind of Christianity. I would have to read more about Wulff to know where he’s coming from. Another posting perhaps.)
Aside from psychology and religion it does seem worth asking why, until recently, one of the most powerful phenomenon known to humanity has been largely shoved out of academia? There is nothing inherently wrong with a person, an academic, holding to a philosophy of materialistic reductionism. I’m sure some of the researchers involved in these new research programs carry such views. But there is no reason that scientific materialism — if not actual atheism — should be the only acceptable public position in higher education. Kudos to Columbia and others for taking the plunge.
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