Academic approaches to spirituality
Positivist, applied and critical
The New Mindscape #T1–5
The New Mindscape is a practical and critical approach to spirituality grounded in critical anthropological and sociological knowledge, based on my academic location within these disciplines.
How we talk about spirituality, and the type of knowledge we generate about it, is different depending on the social space in which the discourse on spirituality takes place.
In modern urban society, there are three such major spaces: non-institutional spiritual networks, institutional religions, and academia.
Alternative spiritual networks
Nowadays, a lot of spiritual practices take place outside of any institutionalized religion; indeed, many people insist that spirituality is distinct from religion. There is a huge galaxy of groups that practice meditation, body-mind-spirit, the New Age Movement, alternative spiritualities, alternative healing, etc. These networks engage in spiritual practices and discourses outside organized religion and academia. This social space is very free because it is restricted neither by religious nor academic orthodoxies or institutional gatekeeping. This is a good thing, since spaces for creativity and originality expand when people can do as they please. Therefore, these non-institutional spiritual networks are spaces where innovation and creativity take place.
But there are also problems with what comes out of those non-institutional spaces. On the one hand, due to their non-institutional nature, these networks lack rigorous systems for critically assessing the type of knowledge used. There is no systematic filtering of the knowledge generated and disseminated. Anybody can just claim they’re a spiritual master and make things up. And those spaces are usually commercialized. Without institutional support, people who want to devote themselves to their practice and to teach them to others tend to run groups like entrepreneurs do, offering services like personal coaching, workshops, and spiritual therapy. The groups are packaged in a commercial fashion, which leads to privileging more marketable methods and ideas, and each individual teacher creating their own “trademark” spiritual products and services. The entrepreneur-consumer relationship between teachers and learners has its limitations for spiritual growth and service, and can strengthen self-centred orientations that are obstacles to spiritual progress. Hence, such spiritual networks have their advantages, but due to their highly commercial and non-institutional nature, the spirituality they propagate is also distorted.[1]
Institutional religions
Institutional religion is very important to spirituality. Although many people now emphasize a dichotomy between spirituality and religion, preferring the “freedom” or the former over the “dogma” of the latter, most spiritual ideas and practices actually come from religion. Non-institutional spiritual networks are ‘picking and eating the fruits’ from the tree of religion, and this tree cannot be ignored when enjoying the spiritual fruits. So, religious roots are most fundamental and need to be addressed when engaging seriously with spiritual practices and ideas.[2]
But a problem with the institutional religious spaces is that there are numerous distinct religious institutions, each adhering to its own sets of ideas and practices. Although this helps to maintain consistency and coherence within a specific tradition, we may close ourselves off from other approaches and perspectives if we limit our investigations exclusively to a single tradition. This can reach the point of sectarianism, in which such investigations are actively discouraged or banned.
Academic institutions
The final space is the academic space, in which academic research and teaching take place about aspects of spirituality and religion. This space differs from non-institutional spiritual networks since academia is not commercial and more critical, but is similar in terms of its open-mindedness in breaking traditional barriers. On the other hand, academia is similar to religious institutions in that both possess traditions of knowledge, methods for assessing validity of knowledge, and a requirement of rigor and discipline in learning and generating knowledge.
Academia is an open, secular space not committed to a single religion. This has its upside and its downside. The good side is that academia is not committed to any religion, forbidding the imposition of a single doctrine and allowing participants to learn different ideas without committing to them. The problematic side stems from academia’s separation of theory and practice: the academic approach makes it difficult to directly engage with spiritual ideas and practices — to take them as more than mere intellectual ideas, but as concepts and practices that are designed to improve our lives. The academic approach is like learning about different cuisines only by reading and watching people eat, without ever tasting yourself or trying your hand at cooking.
This is where I seek to start pushing the boundaries through The New Mindscape: it’s an academically grounded course, but I also want you to taste some spiritual nutrients, and even to learn some basics of the cooking. In The New Mindscape, I hope to experiment with critically and positively engaging with spiritual ideas and practices within the academic space.
Different academic approaches to spirituality
Now let’s look deeper into different locations in the academic space, where people discuss and research on spiritual ideas and practices.
Applied fields
The first location is the ‘applied fields,’ including the disciplines of social work, education, nursing, medicine, etc. People in these fields deal with people suffering from illnesses, going through end-of-life care, facing trauma, experiencing marginality, and so on. Practitioners may find that spiritual approaches could be very useful. For example, a social worker dealing with end-of-life care could find spiritual approaches potentially effective, leading to research on the usefulness of such. If they want to help others overcome stress, they could research on mindfulness and its applications at school or the workplace. Therefore, more and more research work on applying spiritual techniques is taking place in these applied fields.[3]
A problem with this approach is that people in these fields are just ‘taking the fruit from the spiritual tree.’ Their major concern is how such practices could instrumentally be used to deal with a narrow problem. For example, how can spirituality be used for end-of-life care or stress? But there is little deeper investigation of the religious roots and ontologies that have generated these practices to begin with. These spiritual practices are components of all-encompassing religious Human Operating Systems (HOS) — many yoga and meditation practices, for example, were developed within Hindu and Buddhist religious contexts.
The epidemic of stress, or the inability to deal with death, are failures of the dominant HOS of society. The applied approach usually involves plucking programs from a religious HOS in order to remove the religious components and graft them into the secular HOS of our society. There’s nothing wrong with this, as a very practical approach to deal with immediate needs. But it avoids the more difficult questions of, “why is the dominant HOS stressing people out so much?” “Why is it incapable of giving people a sense of meaning for their life and death?”
And, when programs are extracted from a religious HOS and repurposed, we avoid the more difficult questions of, “when the spiritual technique is cut off from its religious root, can it work? What is the value of the religious root?” Or, conversely, “if we apply a technique coming from religion, will be end up, gradually injecting religion into our HOS, without knowing it?” The applied academic approaches rarely broach these difficult questions.
Positivist fields
The second location is what I would call the ‘positivist fields,’ including psychology and neuroscience. Research in these fields focuses on, for instance, the psychological or neurological effects of certain spiritual practices or attitudes. The effects can be measured, providing insight onto how these practices might be beneficial.[4]
But from a critical perspective, there are two problems: 1. Since the research focuses on material effects, the underlying assumptions of spiritual practices are not examined, 2. Research is narrowly focused on the individual, and the social conditions within which spiritual practices are embedded, and within which psychological research and intervention are taking place, are rarely examined. This results in a very narrow and individualist understanding of the person and spiritual practices.
Critical fields
The third field, the ‘critical fields’ in which the New Mindscape is rooted, includes academic philosophy, anthropology, and sociology. Philosophy asks the fundamental questions, but as a modern academic discipline, it has become completely disembodied and theoretical. When Western “philosophy” began in Greece as the “love of wisdom,” it was not simply an intellectual exercise for the mind, but about investigating about how to live your life with wisdom. Philosophy in the original sense of the word, whether in the West or in the East, is an inquiry about how we should live our lives, involving both our minds and our bodies. Despite academic philosophy’s essential role, it has unfortunately become a mere intellectual exercise which is separated from the practice of life.
The contribution that I want to bring comes from the critical fields of anthropology and sociology. However, the approach I propose to experiment with here is very different from the traditional standpoint of anthropology and sociology: to take spirituality not only as an object of study, but as a method for the critical social sciences.
In anthropological and sociological studies, spirituality is usually treated as an object of study. Scholars study a group of people who practice some form of spirituality, they describe them and what they are doing, and they uncover their social, ideological or political structure, and how they are connected to a broader social context.[5] That’s what most of my own published academic research has done.
But researchers using such an approach only look at the spiritual practices, without doing the practices themselves; or if they do the practices as part of the research, academic conventions assume that nothing in the practices could provide insight to the research or methodology.
But I consider that spirituality is fundamental to the method of study in anthropology and sociology. The New Mindscape is the beginning of an experiment to explore the implications of that. Since this is still only the beginning of my elaboration, what I present now are only some very preliminary, not fully mature ideas.
In The New Mindscape T1–4, I consider in more detail the necessity of uncovering the spiritual concerns that underlie the key theories of sociology and anthropology.
When I say that I want to explore a spiritually-grounded approach in the critical academic field, this does not mean that I consider that this is the best place to engage in spirituality. I am also a committed member of a religious institution, and my religious practice within the Baha’i faith is the core of my life. I am an advanced practitioner of Daoist and Tantric forms of meditation. I engage with and have learned enormously from both other institutional religions and the alternative spirituality space, both in terms of practices and ideas. Positivist and applied academic approaches are important contributions to our knowledge. But since I am professionally located in the critical academic field, and given that the critical academic fields have extremely important positive insights to contribute to spirituality, this is where I hope to contribute through The New Mindscape.
[1] Puustinen, Liina and Matti Rautaniemi, 2015. “Wellbeing For Sale: Representations Of Yoga In Commercial Media”, Temenos — Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion(51), 1:45–70. https://doi.org/10.33356/temenos.40878
[2] Frederick, Thomas E., 2008. “Discipleship and Spirituality From A Christian Perspective”, Pastoral Psychology(56), 6:553–560. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-008-0148-8
[3] Belcher, John R. and Marcela Sarmiento Mellinger, 2016. “Integrating Spirituality With Practice and Social Justice: The Challenge For Social Work”, Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought(35), 4:377–394. https://doi.org/10.1080/15426432.2016.1229645
Hill, Peter S. and Kenneth I. Pargament, 2008. “Advances In the Conceptualization And Measurement Of Religion And Spirituality: Implications For Physical And Mental Health Research.”, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality(S), 1:3–17. https://doi.org/10.1037/1941-1022.s.1.3
Plante, Thomas G., 2007. “Integrating Spirituality and Psychotherapy: Ethical Issues And Principles To Consider”, Journal of Clinical Psychology(63), 9:891–902. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20383
Miller, William R. and Carl E. Thoresen, 2003. “Spirituality, Religion, and Health: An Emerging Research Field.”, American Psychologist(58), 1:24–35. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x.58.1.24
[4] Newberg, A., & Waldman, M. R. (2017). How God changes your brain: Breakthrough findings from a leading neuroscientist. Ballantine Books.
Tang, Y. Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), 213–22
Mathur, Anil, Benny Barak, Yong Zhang, Keun Lee, and Boonghee Yoo, 2018. “Global Personal Spirituality: Concept, Measurement, and Correlates Across Cultures”, International Journal of Consumer Studies(42), 6:865–877. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijcs.12464
Kim, S. H., Narae Lee, and Pamela Ebstyne King, 2020. “Dimensions Of Religion and Spirituality: A Longitudinal Topic Modeling Approach”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion(59), 1:62–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12639
Dy-Liacco, Gabriel S., Ralph L. Piedmont, Nichole A. Murray-Swank, Thomas E. Rodgerson, and Martin F. Sherman, 2009. “Spirituality and Religiosity As Cross-cultural Aspects Of Human Experience.”, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality(1), 1:35–52. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014937
[5] Fuller, R. C. (2001). Spiritual, but not religious: Understanding unchurched America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wood, M., & Bunn, C. (2009). Strategy in a Religious Network: A Bourdieuian Critique of the Sociology of Spirituality. Sociology, 43(2), 286–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038508101166
This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
