Here's a new spirituality offering I hadn't heard of before, though not a new way of looking at things.
The interest for me is the controversy about it being offered as a staff training workshop in a university setting. I'm interested because it reminds us that one of the marketplaces of ideas for spirituality in our society is training and personal development -and Christians have been signally bad at being in that agora. I'm interested too because I was, when I was a university chaplain, making efforts to enter that agora, with some success. Part of the point was precisely to conscientise staff development -indeed the university as a whole- about the ideological nature of all such offerings and to begin to tease out the implications for religious and spiritual diversity.
South Bank head defends 'cosmic ordering' workshop | higher news | EducationGuardian.co.uk
Technorati Tags: newagery, ideology, religion, university, gospel, spirituality, workplace, training, Christian
Cosmic ordering, a belief that an individual can use his or her own desires to "connect with the cosmos" and bring them to reality,
The interest for me is the controversy about it being offered as a staff training workshop in a university setting. I'm interested because it reminds us that one of the marketplaces of ideas for spirituality in our society is training and personal development -and Christians have been signally bad at being in that agora. I'm interested too because I was, when I was a university chaplain, making efforts to enter that agora, with some success. Part of the point was precisely to conscientise staff development -indeed the university as a whole- about the ideological nature of all such offerings and to begin to tease out the implications for religious and spiritual diversity.
South Bank head defends 'cosmic ordering' workshop | higher news | EducationGuardian.co.uk
Technorati Tags: newagery, ideology, religion, university, gospel, spirituality, workplace, training, Christian
2 comments:
The question for me would be is participation voluntary or not. I have no problem with a mature and discerning Christian deciding to go. But I would have a problem with Christians being forced to go, irrespective of maturity or comfort levels with something like this.
With you on that Matt.
I think, though, that the bigger issue is how institutions value, police and are/not fair about spirituality and religion in the workplace. For example, this kind of thing raises the issues of what can be paid for, or time be taken from regular work for? And if it's okay for this, why not a Christian seminar on, say, work-life balance, or a Muslim workshop on, say, success through qur'anic recital? And are HEI's aware that some supposedly faith 'neutral' events actually create dilemmas and exlusionary feelings among Christians, inter alia, because of their philosophical presuppositions?
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