Teaching and Learning > DOCUMENTS
Spirituality, learning and wisdom
Douglas Davies
1. Introduction and definitions: explores the idea of spirituality in terms
of its definitions and of modes of acquisition of different types of knowledge
related to them. Has the category of spirituality replaced that of religion
and, in the process, come to be partnered by that of ethics? This part of
the presentation will ponder the rise both of spirituality and ethics as recent
existential and organizational factors working from William Robertson Smith’s
argument that spirituality is not a distinct faculty but the total dedication
of a self in a particular direction as a springboard for considering contemporary
issues.
2. Theoretical issues: drawing from Dan Sperber and Harvey Whitehouse’s
theories to approach spirituality from a distinctive direction. Sperber’s
distinction between encyclopaedic and symbolic knowledge raises the question
of whether spirituality is taught or caught and poses questions of the teacher
and teaching contexts. Whitehouse’s two modes of religion (imagistic
and doctrinal) will allow us to ponder issues of personal crisis and classroom
learning, of library and fieldwork factors, and of types of subject area.
3. Age, crisis and development will analyze the notion of education as change
utilizing material from research on the Sea of Faith Network to consider the
issue of age, life-course and religious-existential-secular understanding.
The speaker will also use his own notion of superplausibility to ponder the
idea of wisdom in sprirituality.
This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
