On Aug 9, 2012, the New York Times published an interesting article: "Merging Spirituality and Clinical Psychology at Columbia" by Sharon Otterman. Critics of the program stated:
“From my perspective, psychology must remain neutral. ... With the assumption that we are inherently spiritual beings, I worry that therapists who come out of such a program are going to be approaching their clients with this expectation that they have to contact their spirituality, and I don’t know where that is going to leave some clients." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/education/columbia-program-merges-therapy-and-spirituality.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&emc=eta1
“From my perspective, psychology must remain neutral. ... With the assumption that we are inherently spiritual beings, I worry that therapists who come out of such a program are going to be approaching their clients with this expectation that they have to contact their spirituality, and I don’t know where that is going to leave some clients." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/education/columbia-program-merges-therapy-and-spirituality.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&emc=eta1
A major difficulty is that many scientists - and patients - have minimal understanding of spirituality, and may well have personal biases against it - ignorance & bias cause train wrecks, not advances in quality of life. Difficult yet important areas like spirituality need intelligent, unbiased, high-level inquiry.
Sharon Daloz Parks is Associate Director and Faculty at the Whidbey Institute, and formerly associate professor at the Harvard Divinity School and the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. She's also served in faculty and research positions at the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government. Here's her take on 'faith' - but you could equally refer to it as 'spirituality':
Sharon Daloz Parks is Associate Director and Faculty at the Whidbey Institute, and formerly associate professor at the Harvard Divinity School and the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. She's also served in faculty and research positions at the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government. Here's her take on 'faith' - but you could equally refer to it as 'spirituality':
“… faith must be emancipated from its too-easy equation with belief & religion, and reconnected with … matters of truth, reality, and ultimate importance. … personal, affective, visceral, and passional dimensions of being and knowing.
If faith ( meaning-making in its broadest sense ) is discounted, the human landscape becomes arid, and hope and commitment wither; the human spirit grows parched, and not much more than a prickly cynicism can be sustained.
Faith understood as static, fixed, & inextricably bound to a particular language or world-view, must be discarded as obsolete, if the integrity of intellect & soul is to be maintained in a dynamic world.
Cynicism functions as a kind of armor against disappointment & despair. Skepticism combines the power to question with an openness to being convinced. Skepticism can be a healthy form of doubt, or it may reflect the loss of a once-shared trust in a universe of meaning, however that was defined. It may also function as a thin veneer of public sophistication, glossing over a private, lonely void that neither the rational mind nor economic success can fill. (intellectual bypassing)
In our time, we have become at once scientifically informed, philosophically relativistic, and disappointed and disillusioned in many quarters. Yet ironically (meaning) can come alive in an engagement with radical uncertainty.”
Parks SD. "Big questions, worthy dreams. Mentoring young adults in their search for meaning, purpose, and faith." John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco, 2000.
If faith ( meaning-making in its broadest sense ) is discounted, the human landscape becomes arid, and hope and commitment wither; the human spirit grows parched, and not much more than a prickly cynicism can be sustained.
Faith understood as static, fixed, & inextricably bound to a particular language or world-view, must be discarded as obsolete, if the integrity of intellect & soul is to be maintained in a dynamic world.
Cynicism functions as a kind of armor against disappointment & despair. Skepticism combines the power to question with an openness to being convinced. Skepticism can be a healthy form of doubt, or it may reflect the loss of a once-shared trust in a universe of meaning, however that was defined. It may also function as a thin veneer of public sophistication, glossing over a private, lonely void that neither the rational mind nor economic success can fill. (intellectual bypassing)
In our time, we have become at once scientifically informed, philosophically relativistic, and disappointed and disillusioned in many quarters. Yet ironically (meaning) can come alive in an engagement with radical uncertainty.”
Parks SD. "Big questions, worthy dreams. Mentoring young adults in their search for meaning, purpose, and faith." John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco, 2000.
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| Photo: Amanda Mack www.smithsonianmag.com |
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