Don,
I really appreciate what you have shared about perennialists and
unquestioned assumptions. I have to admit that before I read the
section of your article that you quoted before that I have pretty much
been a perennialist myself. Perhaps as this field matures, we will
all be able to move from trying to find a Unified Field Theory of
Spirituality and Religion in the Workplace to a perspective that
values the diversity of religious and spiritual experiences, practices
and theology that exist in our places of work in the U.S. and around
the world.
Warm Regards,
Judith Neal, Ph.D.
Director, John H. Tyson Center for Faith and Spirituality in the Workplace
Sam M. Walton College of Business
University of Arkansas
Quoting Don McCormick <
don.mccormick@CSUN.EDU>:
>
> On Apr 4, 2009, at 10:29 AM, Judi Neal wrote:
>
>> This is a wonderful dialogue that is happening on the listserve right now,
>> but I notice that there hasn't been any mention of teaching. I wonder how
>> many of these issues around the distinctions between faith, religion, and
>> spirituality come up in the classroom and how people handle them.
>
> I've seen issues about this come up. I wrote about in the Organization
> Management Journal. The article was about the problem of
> indoctrination in courses about spirituality in the workplace. The
> problem I've seen occurs when we take a spiritual stance and teach it
> as if it is the truth, instead of one of many competing spiritual and
> religious ideologies.
>
>> Another incident that alerted me to the problem of a dominating
>> spiritual ideology happened at a
>> training session my university held for adjunct faculty members,
>> where I wound up talking to a
>> professor from another university. He told me that his course on
>> spirituality and work was very
>> popular and had fabulous student evaluations, but some students
>> were concerned about the course
>> and their own religion. He said, “I just make sure that they
>> realize that spirituality has nothing to
>> do with religion!”
>>
>> He didn’t seem able to imagine why someone would object or that
>> some peoples’ spirituality has
>> everything to do with their religion. He didn’t realize that he was
>> uncritically presenting his ideological
>> stance about the separation of religion and spirituality as truth,
>> or that what he said was a
>> religious belief.
>>
>> I observed a more sophisticated example of this at a professional
>> development workshop before a
>> major academic meeting, where a colleague was presenting on ways to
>> teach about spirituality in
>> the workplace. In his course, he taught that different religions
>> and spiritual paths evolved from
>> different cultural and historical interpretations of a single core
>> mystical experience that was universal.
>> I generally agree with this perspective, but it appeared that my
>> colleague didn’t realize that there
>> also existed many other legitimate, competing perspectives about
>> the relationship between religions.
>> He didn’t seem to be aware that he was teaching a perspective, not
>> the truth. The field of
>> religious studies calls this particular religious ideology
>> perennialism, as one of its key assertions is
>> that “all ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ mystics have always (perennially)
>> arrived at the same set of metaphysical
>> truths” (Kripal, 2003, p. 67). Famous advocates of this unity
>> “underlying religion’s diverse
>> historical forms” (Wulff, 1997, p. 632) include Huston Smith
>> (1991), Ken Wilber (2000),
>> John Hick (1985), and Aldous Huxley (1945). In the spirituality in
>> the workplace movement, Mitroff
>> and Denton (1999) are perennialism’s most prominent advocates, and
>> it is a common—
>> possibly the dominant—perspective in the Academy of Management’s
>> Management, Spirituality
>> and Religion Interest Group. Years ago, perennialism dominated
>> religious studies, but now the
>> perennialists have become an “embattled minority” (Horgan, 2003,
>> p. 13). My colleague at the
>> professional development workshop didn’t realize that his view was
>> not undebatable truth, but
>> was a highly debatable ideological stance. In this sense his
>> ideology was hegemonic—so encompassing
>> that it didn’t occur to him or the other people in the room that
>> there could be other views.
>>
>> Perennialism works out differences between religions in a manner
>> that appeals to some, but that
>> leaves others feeling misrepresented. The philosopher of religion
>> Steven Katz feels that perennialism
>> distorts important elements of Jewish mysticism in order to make it
>> more “mutually compatible”
>> (Horgan, 2003, p. 45) with other mystical traditions. The Catholic
>> scholar of mysticism Bernard
>> McGinn complains that perennialism “strips Christian mysticism of
>> precisely those religious
>> distinctions that he as a Catholic finds most meaningful” (Horgan,
>> 2003, p. 40). Katz says perennialists,
>> “think they are being ecumenical; they’re saying everybody has the
>> same belief. But they
>> are doing injustice to all the people who say, ‘I’m not believing
>> like you do’” (quoted in Horgan,
>> 2003, p. 47). I see colleagues who are blind to the problem and
>> worry that the damage to students
>> is invisible. I teach a lot of working class students who hold
>> religious and spiritual beliefs that are
>> unfashionable in the academy, and I worry about what can be done to
>> them, especially when I
>> hear the perennialists’ unquestioned assumptions.
>
> - Don
>
> ---
> Don McCormick
> Department of Management, College of Business and Economics
> California State University Northridge, Juniper Hall 4218
> 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge CA 91330
>
http://www.csun.edu/~dmccormick (818) 677-2418
>
>
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