Let me now turn our attention to my personal contemplation:I know some spiritual insights that have influenced my life, but I do not (and certainly will never) know the totality of how being”critical”reflects spirituality.
In a religiously affiliated educational institution in which I belong to at present, to be”critical” may be comprehended as putting”worldly” worldviews under the critical light of “heavenly” or “divine”dogmas. For religious people such as christians, for example, the “truth” or “reality” that they believe in is that of “not[being] conformed to this would, but be transformed by the renewing of[our]mind,that[we] may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God”(Romans 12:1,New King James Version[NKJV];see Alkitab Holy BIble,2005, italics original). In essence, for Christians the yardstick against which “truth”is measured is the Lord Jesus Christ who is believed to be “the way, the truth, and the life”(Jhon 14:6.NKJV;see Alkitab Holy Bible,2005).
And perhaps for some religious people who are often labeled as”fundamentalists”,
democracy is not a truth but theocracy is. when every aspect in religious life must submit to the authority of the Divine Being, then democracy is not only “secular” but also scandalous,if not “adulterous”,because from -, for-,and by-the-people worldview puts people at the center of attention and the Divine Being at the periphery.
Subtly and yet surely, nonetheless,a lot of scholars in social sciences and humanities oftentimes not only keep themselves at a istances from spiritual beliefs, but some even make religiosity or spirituality ascapegoat that dissminetes allegedly unchallenged, monologic, or, in bakhtin’s (1981) team,”authoritative discourse”.on the contrary,rejecting spiritual beliefs is an authoritative discourse of the current,moderenistic academia that is susceptible to an epistemological fallacy.
As taylor (2005) argues:
The postmodernist rejects modernism’s elefasion of science above other posible perspektif on the world. Westren science, westren religion, pritive magic, eastern mystical world views-each of these different systems of thought hafe their own,internal standards of what it is reasonable to believe. The modernist supposed that all belief systms should be measured against a single set of ‘rational’standar,embodide in scientific method.The postmodernist allows that what is rational varies accordingto one’s perspective,and that western science is simply one such perspective among many…..To the religious believe who feels the oppressive force of modernism’s rejection of the rationality of religius belief, this postmodern openness will come as a great relief….(p.70)
It is a great relief that postmodernism, in other words,makes it possible for spiritual insights such as that of Christianity, Islam,Hindu,or buddha are accommodated in the academia,especially in foregin language education.More specifically,the religious worldview constitutes a yardsck for spiritual people agains which other non-spiritual worldviews are critically discerned and measured.
Thus,being spiritually critical means haveing spiritual discernment guided by the Divine Being.Nebulous as it may sound,the discernmenthas actually two edges: spiritual and humanistic.While the former remains largely wihin the scop of someone’s invisible “heart” or constcience,the leatter can be perceived by written or spoken reflections and action-both of which mirror again the spiritual values (e.g.,love and compassion).
Luke (2004) contends that being critical”entails an epistemological Othering and ‘doubling’of the world-a sense of being beside oneself or outside of oneslf in another epistemological, discourse, and political space than one typically would inhabit”. This can be made sense of in at least two ways:”as an intellectual, deconstructive, textual, and cognitive analytic task and as a form of embodied political anger, alienation, and alterity” (p. 26). To be “Othered”, i.e., “object of racialized, colored and classed, and gendered and sexualized power” (p. 28), means to be marginalized from the mainstream or dominant society. By having the empathy toward the Other, critical educators and learners will have the opportunity to experience how it feels to be marginalized.
Spiritual people have in fact been “othered” by secular academia that regards spirituality as illogical, absurd, and irrelevant to the advancement of knowledge, science, and technology. On the other hand, those claiming to be spiritual have also marginalized themselves in that they feel reluctant(or “too holy”) to mingle with those considered non-spiritual. Even worse, some “spiritual” authorities have oppressed those of not the same degree or path of spirituality, including those in the academia. Galileo Galilei encountered vehement rejection from the Rome Catholic Church because he accepted Copernican heliocentric system – a system which believes that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun and criticizes the belief that the earth is the center of the universe (see Galileo, 2009). It is therefore desirable that CPs keep the balance between the secularism and spiritualism. That is, “doubling of the world” should be in critical educators’ spirit so even though they come from a certain religious inclination, be it spiritual or secular, they do not marginalize those from the “other(ed)” world(view). In chapter 8, some of spiritual issues in CPs will be addressed more fully.
A more complex way than “doubling of the world” beyond the secularism-spiritualism continuum i delving into one’s own epistemological stances, to which I will turn in the next section. In fact, such stances go beyond (or transgress) simplistic dichotomous models of understanding the world (e.g., recall again “good” vs. “bad” and “secular” vs.”spiritual”). They also enrich Bakhtin’s visionary view of heteroglossia that celebrates the multiplicity of voices, especially in one’s own mind.
