Embodied Spirituality: The place of culture and tradition in contemporary educational discourse on spirituality

Abstract

The paper explores the cultural context of contemporary educational discourse on spirituality in Great Britain by defending the following theses: spiritual education seeks a universal perspective that transcends any specific cultural context and tradition; it disengages itself from the culture of modernity, which it perceives as a spiritual desert; it finds in the tradition of late 18th and early 19th Century romanticism resources to support the recovery of a lost dimension of spirituality; however the integrity of spiritual education is threatened by the colonisation of romanticism by the tradition of post‐modernity; indeed aspects of spiritual education already embody a post‐modern perspective; an authentic spiritual education requires contextualisation in a plurality of spiritual traditions.