Religion & Education
the staggering fact that 56,000 electronic places use the word “God” in their
descriptions, and over 45,000 sites refer to other types of deities. By the
year 2000, this list had doubled. The website www.beliefnet.org receives
upward of 500,000 hits a day. Phyllis Tickle, in her God-Talk in America,32
estimates that, by 2010, over 20 percent of all adult Americans will worship,
pray, and receive spiritual instruction exclusively over the Internet. For these
Americans, churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples will soon become
quaint anachronisms.
One of the main reasons I created my religion and spirituality course
for educators was to respond to hundreds of my students in recent years
who have wondered openly why the schools and colleges have not caught
up to the culture at large on religio-spiritual matters. Religion matters deeply
to them, even when they are attacking it, and to me as well. Among our
concerns is our need to know if the existing churches are really in trouble,
particularly if believers become disenchanted with conventional forms of
theism, or, perhaps, become less willing to stay with one faith tradition.
From another point of view, we are also curious about the millennial possibility
that maybe one cosmic belief system will someday fit all, and whether the
birth and spread of this new spiritual consciousness are even desirable.
But most of all we want, indeed we insist on, the existence of structured
educational opportunities at all levels of schooling, in the company of others,
to examine our own spiritual impulses. We want to create a personal and
professional spirituality that satisfies our struggling, imperfect longing for
meaning and purpose. We want to understand, as best we can, the mystery
that lies at the center of the universe’s greatest riddles. And we need to put
the failures and successes of humanity’s perennial religio-spiritual project
into some kind of realistic, yet compassionate, perspective. I believe strongly
that the opportunity for professional educators (and their students as well)
to confront the spiritual dimension of their lives in a formal classroom setting
is an idea whose time has finally come in teacher education programs.