Pedagogy

“Twenty-five hundred years ago it took an exceptional man like Diogenes to exclaim, ‘I am not an Athenian or a Greek but a citizen of the world.’ Today we must all be struggling to make those words our own. We have come to the point in history when anyone who is only Japanese or American, only Oriental or Occidental, is only half human. The other half that beats with the pulse of humanity has yet to be born.”

                            – Huston Smith, The World’s Religions

The educational philosophy underlying this program rests on a convergence of academic rigor and personal spiritual exploration. Our task as educators is not simply to guide students toward a historical understanding of what was, but to help them master the tools to learn about and possibly awaken to what is—The Absolute Reality (e.g., Allah, Brahma, Dharmakaya, God, Great Spirit, Sunya, Tao). To achieve this end, our faculty is comprised of scholar/practitioners who have been authenticated by their respective traditions, and who have learned to speak from that tradition rather than for that tradition. The importance of this quality of speaking from rather than for a given tradition cannot be overestimated, and is central to making this program unique and uniquely InterSpiritual.

To speak for a tradition is to speak to what is fixed, formal, and normative within that tradition. It is to speak for the past. To speak from a tradition is to engage the past as a catalyst for addressing the present. Speaking from is at the heart of InterSpirituality, and fosters an open and intellectually adventurous learning environment. Understanding the teachings and practices of the world’s great wisdom traditions is the starting point of InterSpirituality, not the end-point. We excavate the past to uncover common themes as well as uncommon ways of articulating the themes unique to each tradition. Our goal is not simply to master the past, but to engage the present. We explore how the universal themes of the human spiritual quest manifest in our own time, and discover how the confluence of ancient wisdom and culture can spark a new stage in human spiritual evolution based on collaboration rather than competition for economic and geopolitical power.

The Program in InterSpiritual Studies asks of its students academic rigor and a serious commitment to personal spiritual practice.  We encourage each student to discover and honor her or his own spiritual style and questions as they engage in the process of inquiry, insight, and integration.   Following are twelve families of spiritual styles or possible spiritual paths that our students might wish to explore: Path of The Arts, Path of the Body, Path of Contemplation & Meditation, Path of Devotion and Faith, Path of Healing, Path of Intellect and Science, Path of Love and Compassion, Path of the Mystic, Path of Nature, Path of Prayer, Path of Relationships and Service, Path of Wisdom.