Attitudes Toward Religion and Spirituality

Perhaps more than any other topic in education or the general humanities, religion and spirituality suffer from a lack of agreement with regard to definition. At one extreme is the view that the two constructs are synonymous; to be religious is to be spiritual and vice versa. At the other end is the viewpoint that religion is a more formalized set of processes, often rooted in historical literature, that are practiced in accordance with a higher power. The construct of religion, then, is different from spirituality in that spirituality need not involve any aspect of religion. A person who would normally be seen as an atheist or one who follows nontraditional (or more often non-Western) beliefs can still be very spiritual. An existential view of ...