Spirituality Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Approach
The study of spirituality as a dimension of
professional practice in health, social work, and education has
emerged since the mid-1980’s. The challenges vary from fundamental
questions of how to think about and study spiritualities, to more
practical problems of how to identify and provide for the spiritual
needs of service users. Cultural and social influences are also
important considerations, both as they give rise to spiritual forms
and, particularly in the West, as they signal a loss of spiritual
patrimony and/or spiritual potential [1].
The purpose of spirituality studies is to
conceptualise the relationship between professionalised caring and
educational provision on the one hand, and spirituality in its
plural forms and contexts on the other. Research in spirituality
studies does not adhere to any single philosophical or theological
epistemology. Rather it draws upon a range philosophical [2-6],
psychological [7-9], anthropological [10, 11], theological [12-15],
and semiological methodologies [16-19].
A major critical issue for spirituality
studies is to understand how the structures of the caring and
educational professions inhibit or negate particular
spiritualities, due especially to implicit ideologies of
professionalism [20, 21], paradigms of rationality [22], and
principles of knowledge [23].
Spirituality is conceived in accordance with
the heterogeneity of human experience, and therefore as something
that interrupts and disturbs the ongoing particular narratives of
health and social care.
Cultural and Professional Contexts
Spirituality studies are developing in a
public climate of secularism. Religious believers, especially those
whose spirituality expresses dogmatic attitudes, adhere to
standards of knowledge which may deviate from what is publicly
warranted. In a secular milieu, even elementary knowledge of
spiritual beliefs, practices, and traditions—knowledge of their
histories, teachings, sacred texts, and formative figures—declines.
Large numbers of people may not have the vaguest knowledge of these
things. In such circumstances, people’s interest in ‘spirtuality’
may frequently be eclectic and ‘alternative’. More generally, there
is a widespread belief that religious doctrines are merely opinions
that may or may not be affirmed according to individual preference.
The notion that there is an objective truth about matters of
spirituality and faith, indeed the very idea of truth itself, is
certainly subject to the forces of cultural relativism. This
dissolution of truth undercuts some traditional religious and
spiritual traditions, which consequently find little legitimacy in
a secularist culture.
The question of spirituality, as it arises in
spirituality studies, presents itself against the background of the
professionalisation of caring roles throughout the 20th
century. It appears against an implicitly ‘scientific’
outlook which values empirical research over religious faith [22],
and in the light of preconceptions of culture and value which are
to a significant degree modernist in character [24-26].
Accordingly, ‘spirituality’ is thought of mainly as an expression
of individual behaviour, without the traditional religious or cult
meanings which would imply that human behaviour is perfected
through certain types of spiritual acts. Thought of as aggregated
behaviour, spirituality is seen as contributing to social life and
as the object of social scientific analysis [27-29]. The study of
spirituality is then concerned primarily with styles of life and
forms of collective behaviour. The current state of spirituality
studies is due to scholarly engagement, often critical, with the
assumptions of these general perspective on spirituality.
Especially significant for the methodology of
spirituality studies is the credibility of what is a seemingly
widespread and popular assumption, namely that ‘spirituality’ has a
degree of historical authenticity which religion lacks: that
spirituality emerges within western societies according as the
influence of religion, particularly Christianity, declines [1, 30,
31]. Under this assumption, spirituality is construed as a process
of secularisation, whose forms of expression grant priority to
direct experience over metaphysical reasoning [31], express the
person here and now rather than a feeling for eternity, and are
directed towards a harmonious relationship with nature [32]. The
study of spirituality is, in this way, legitimated with reference
to the growth in certain patterns of behaviour, rather than to
religious practices.
This is a perspective of considerable
methodological significance, as it attempts to bring clarity to the
notion of ‘spirituality’ by mapping changes in the contemporary
landscape of the sacred, or changes in the forms of religious
expression, rather than by referring to the theologies of revealed
faiths. The danger with this approach is that it excludes the
spiritualities of revealed religions.
Spirituality and Radical Plurality
Spirituality not as a single reality. Rather,
it is radically plural. Spiritualities provide perspectives on the
value of health, suffering, community, and moral and religious
formation which can be critical of the idioms of the caring
professions [33]; furthermore, they may call for caring practices
to be reconceptualised as themselves being inherently spiritual
actions (e.g., as giving form to the mutual involvement of human
beings and God, see [34-36]). The study of spiritual care and
education has become increasingly reflexive in recent years,
referring back often critically to unexamined assumptions within
the professions, especially as these assumptions are propagated
through professional education. Thus considered, care is
potentially spiritual, and spirituality is no longer only, or
mainly, an exclusively religious discipline, but also a critical
consciousness of context which provides patterns and strategies for
thought about matters of care.
Such a view of spirituality must find its
footing in a context, since spiritualities always bear a context
from which they take form. The context for current
conceptualisations of spirituality is that of postmodernity.
“Postmodernity” focuses on the manifest loss of plausibility of the
so-called modern master narratives. According to Jean-Francois
Lyotard, this is due to the emergence of “counter-examples” which
have made it clear that modernity could not fulfil its own
promises. The postmodern can be construed as an attempt to rework
the unconscious legacy of modernity by working it through in a
radical fashion, exposing and re-examining its unacknowledged
assumptions, confronting the crisis of its ending. It is notable
that at one point Lyotard compares the postmodern task of working
through the repressed meanings of modernity to therapeutic
activity. He writes,
If we renege on this responsibility, we are
certain to condemn ourselves to a simple and undisplaced repetition
of the ‘modern neurosis’, the whole Western schizophrenia and
paranoia which have been the source of our well known misfortunes
during two centuries. Thus understood, the ‘post-’ of postmodernism
does not signify a movement of come back, flash back or feed back,
that is, of repetition, but a process of ana-’, analysis,
anamnesis, anagogy, anamorphosis, which works out an ‘initial
forgetting’. [37]
In this passage we see reference to anamnesis
or memorial, the basic structure of many spiritual practices and
religious rituals, which is more than a mere reenactment of past
events, but simultaneously an anticipation of the future as an
eschatological event.
The loss of plausibility in master narratives
is coupled with a growing consciousness of: (1) the fundamental
plurality of the postmodern condition [17, 24, 38, 39], (2) the
radical particularity and contextuality of one’s own narrative
[40], and (3) the irreducible heterogeneity which emerges in the
midst of that plurality . Spirituality studies have attempted to
develop a critical consciousness of these conditions through its
adoption of hermeneutical methodologies. Of the various
interpretative methods (rhetorical, narrative, semiotic) needed to
understand spirituality, narrative analysis has a special
importance. It is the most reflexive interpretative methodology on
matters of medicine and spirituality [41-43]; it is an established
methodology for investigating the meaning of caring in nursing
practice [44]; and more generally, it studies narrative as the
locus of a postmodern settlement that has emerged between science
and religion concerning fundamental questions of human nature and
freedom [45]. The theory of narrative interpretation is thoroughly
concerned with the theoretical and pragmatic assumptions about
‘spirit’ that prevail today.
Three streams of spirituality studies
Broadly speaking, ‘spirituality’ has come to
symbolise the human quests for depth and values, our vision of the
human spirit and whatever practices or lifestyles enable this
vision to achieve its fullest potential. ‘Spirituality’ describes
how people relate their beliefs about God to their core values and
then express these beliefs in spiritual practices. It also connotes
practices important to the formation of social and religious
communities.
Pedagogical Approach
One stream of spirituality studies relates
this understanding of spirituality to models of professional
practice in medicine, nursing, social work, and education,
especially as these are directed towards the spiritual needs of
service users. So, for example, Narayanasamy [46] associates
spirituality with an holistic model of nursing and health care,
i.e. care of the body, mind and spirit. McSherry [47] identifies
spirituality as an umbrella term for the multidimensional elements
of patients needs.
The strength of this approach is that is
suited to established methods of professional education and
development.
Interpretative Approach
By comparison with other approaches in
spirituality studies, the pedagogical approach does not
sufficiently represent professional care practices as providing a
context which gives form to spirituality. A second strand of
spirituality studies is more interpretative and aims to demonstrate
the possibilities that exist for finding spiritual meaning in the
structures of behaviour surrounding care giving. In general, this
approach involves cultural and linguistic analysis, is rooted in
contemporary anthropological and linguistic theory, and emphasises
the way in which a person’s spiritual and/or religious attitudes,
experiences, and beliefs are taken over from the
religious/socio-cultural setting in which he or she grows into
maturity (as happens with language and culture generally). From
this standpoint, spirituality is understood as formed by practices,
symbolism, and beliefs taken over from the culture within which one
grows into selfhood and continues to live. Included in this context
are the institutions and practices of professional care and
education.
The strength of this approach is in
demonstrating possibilities of finding spiritual meaning in
structures of behaviour surrounding care giving. Its weakness is
that may shrink the scope of spirituality as this is actualised in
the lives of services users, since the approach primarily
represents their situation as service users, thereby
conceptualising spirituality as the capacity to find care provision
meaningful.
Discursive Approach
An emerging approach in spirituality studies understands care,
education, and spiritual practices to be relational and enacted
through discursive exchanges among participants within a shared
context. Thus, practitioners are understood to be involved in
complex discursive practices which, inter alia, involve polyphonic
speaking about God. This interdisciplinary approach focuses on the
influence of social location, ideological determination, cultural
embeddedness, paradigm-bound rationality, and contextualised
knowledge on the notions of ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritual care’.
Rather than seeking to determine the meaning of spirituality or
spiritual care, it aims at fostering discourses about spiritual
care and spiritual formation. This interdisciplinary approach is
pioneered by members of the Centre for Spirituality Studies at the
University of Hull, United Kingdom.
Foundations of Spirituality Studies
Whether any theoretical foundation for
spirituality studies is legitimate remains an unresolved question
to this point. There are, however, a number of theoretical
considerations of fundamental importance. Firstly, spirituality is
always inescapably specific and contextual. In other words,
spiritual traditions always arise from the experiences and
practices of particular groups of people within specific contexts
of time and place. To study spirituality is not a matter of
examining an abstract concept, ‘spirituality as such’, which is
arrived at by purely logical means or derived from first
principles. It is never a matter for spirituality studies to defend
some ideologically pure idea of spirituality, but rather to study
concrete particularities.
Secondly, spirituality is almost invariably
qualified with reference to a specific tradition, often a religious
tradition, and therefore relates to the ritual practices and
beliefs of a faith community. Despite cultural suspicions of
dogmatism, and a dubious tendency in academic literature to
distinguish ‘spirituality’ from ‘religion’, there remains an
unavoidable connection between spiritual experience and practices
on the one hand, and religious beliefs on the other. Indeed, there
are many spiritualities which express a dogmatic attitude, and
which can only be understood in relation to the fundamental themes
of their dogmatic traditions. Therefore, spirituality studies
should engage in dialogue with a range of theologies.
In addition, spirituality studies seek to
understand the philosophical and psychological foundations of the
interpersonal and social dimensions of spiritual experience.
Spirituality is approached not only through religious traditions,
but also through contemporary themes, such as politics, ecology,
literature, aesthetics, etc. Especially important in this respect
an understanding of the human sensibility for symbols. This
sensibility is a fact of human existence, more fundamental to the
understanding of spirituality than current tends in spiritual
behaviours and practices.
Apart from the doctrinal and philosophical
foundations of spiritualities, it is also important to achieve a
holistic understanding of the phenomenon, to attend, that is, to
the importance of the specific contexts within which people live
out their relationship with the other, others, and God. The
significance of culture as it shapes these relationships is always
considerable.
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Paul Dearey