Program Objectives

Our objective is to help each student acquire spiritual knowledge, tools, and practices for their professional and personal lives in the following areas:

Interdisciplinary

The emerging field of InterSpiritual Studies is highly interdisciplinary. Thus our intensives and courses draw from a variety of fields including music, art, architecture, history, sociology, transpersonal psychology, comparative literature, comparative religion, and feminist and post-modern thought.

Major Focus on a Spiritual Tradition

This program will enable students to complete a graduate degree with a scholarly/experiential emphasis on a major spiritual tradition such as Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, and Judaism.

Social Meaning

While rigorous in its academics, the Spiritual Paths Institute is also concerned with the potential for InterSpirituality to enhance human life, culture, and global understanding. The program will help students to become more knowledgeable, effective, empathic participants in our increasingly culturally and spiritually pluralistic society.

Professional Development

This program will help professionals to apply InterSpiritual knowledge, principles, and practices to a variety of fields including but not limited to education, environment, social work, ministry, chaplaincy, psychology, psychiatry, law enforcement, law, politics, economics, business, the military, and the arts. It will help qualify professionals in such emerging fields as InterSpiritual education, counseling, and ministry.

Personal Development

This program will help students deepen their own personal lives through an understanding of the world’s spiritual traditions and to develop their own spiritual paths rooted in these traditions.