Pagan chaplain appointed at Syracuse University

Syracuse University has appointed Mary Hudson to be the university’s first pagan chaplain. She is reportedly the second pagan appointed a university chaplain; the first is at the University of Southern Maine. The piece offers background and quotes from Ms Hudson and students.

[ABC News via Inside Higher Ed]

How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (6) Can the HERI survey put the matter to rest?

In the last post in this series I summarized some of Christian Smith’s reservations about the degree of “spiritual seeking” among teenagers. Few, he finds, are on the “spiritual but not religious” quests that other researchers are so taken with. Can the HERI survey resolve the disagreement?

Probably not.

To get at the students’ “spirituality,” the HERI team adopts two strategies, neither of which gives me much confidence that their results can be used to adjudicate between Cherry, Beaudoin, and Wuthnow, on the one hand, and Smith’s findings for teens, on the other.

• Strategy one entails letting respondents provide their own definition of “spiritual,” “spirituality,” and “spiritual quest.” But do the students understand “spirituality” in the way that the researchers do? Little way to tell.
• Strategy two involved developing “scales” to measure dimensions of “spirituality”—Spirituality, Spiritual Quest, and Equanimity—that upon examination may not easily stand for what their titles suggest.

A longish justification for my lack of confidence follows the break.

How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (4) More “spiritual” than “religious”?

In summing up their in-depth survey of the religious belief and practice of undergraduates at three universities and one college, researchers Conrad Cherry, Betty DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield offer a distinction that may be important for understanding undergraduate belief and practice. “The undergraduates we interviewed, as well as many of the campus professionals who helped us interpret the religion of undergraduates,” they explain, “preferred to use the worlds ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritual’ instead of ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ when describing undergraduate attitudes and practices.”[Cherry, 275] Cherry and his colleagues suggest that by “religion” or “religious” students and campus professionals mean institutions or organizations and by “spirituality” or “spiritual” they had in mind a personal experience of God or Higher Power and an expression of ultimate concerns and values. The sociologist Robert Wuthnow put it this way, quoting from an informant in his sixties, “Religion is structure, an institution. It limits you. Spirituality is something you are.” More formally, Wuthnow defines spirituality “as a state of being related to a divine, supernatural, or transcendent order of reality or, alternatively, as a sense or awareness of a suprareality that goes beyond life as ordinarily experienced.” [Wuthnow (2001), 306] It may, or may not, occur within an institutional context designed to encourage or nurture this spirituality.

Cherry and his colleagues suggest that “spiritual” or “spirituality” also connotes for today’s undergraduates a quest or journey while “religious” or “religion” suggests something fixed and handed down. One of their informants, a chaplain at a Catholic university, offer this striking definition and explanation, “Religion means, literally, to bind. Although those of us in the professional religious business see this binding as ultimately freeing, binding of any kind is antithetical to the late-adolescent project. It’s a time of questioning and stepping back.”[Cherry, 275]

Obviously, being within an institutional or organizational structure does not prevent one from feeling related to a divine, supernatural, or transcendent order of reality, and for much of history, that is how people experienced spirituality. But that may be changing.

How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (1) Religious Preferences

Over the next several posts, I propose to explore two recent surveys on the religiosity/spirituality of today’s college students, one of teenagers ages 13-17, the other of first year college and university students. Given how rapidly student generations change, these results from eight and five years ago respectively may be a bit out of date but should still be suggestive.

Some questions to ponder when reading the posts: How well do your students fit the statistical profile found by the surveys? In what ways do they differ? What problems as well as opportunities might such students pose? Do these results suggest issues that we, as educators, need to address in the classroom? Are conceptual muddles regarding religious or spiritual convictions any of our business as college or university faculty? And while reflecting on the surveys may reveal about student belief and practice, we might also ponder how we faculty might have answered had we undergone such surveys ourselves.

To start out the series, let’s begin with a table that summarizes the self-reported religious preference of a large sample of the American population in 2001 and 2009 and compare these national results with the self-reported religious preference of a survey of teens in 2002-3 and of college students in 2004.

	ARIS 2001(national) %	NSYR 2002-3(teens) %	HERI 2004(college students) %	ARIS 2008 (national) %
Protestant (Baptist+ Mainline+ Generic+ Pentecostal, etc.)	50.4	52.0	45.6	49.5
Catholic	24.5	23.0	28.0	25.1
Mormon	1.3	2.5	4.0	1.4
Jewish	1.4	1.5	2.0	1.2
Jehovah’s Witness	0.6	0.6	–	0.8
Moslem	0.5	0.5	1.0	0.6
Eastern Orthodox	0.3	0.3	1.0	–
Buddhist	0.5	0.3	1.0	0.5
Pagan or Wiccan	0.1	0.3	–	–
Hindu	0.4	0.1	1.0	–
Christian Science	0.1	0.1	–	–
Native American	0.1	0.1	–	–
Unitarian Universalist	0.3	0.1	0.4	–
None/Not religious	14.1	16.0	17.0	15.0

Self-identified Christians make up about three-quarters of each population: the national population, the 14 percent of the population that are teenagers (ages 13-17), and the population of first-year students in college and university. Catholics make up about a third of the Christian segment and a quarter of the overall population, with a slightly greater proportion of Catholics attending college than Protestants. Other differences—for example, the higher representation of Mormons in college than in the national population or the greater proportion of people who self-identify as “not religious” in college than in the national population—are probably significant but may just reflect slight differences in the way the four surveys were structured and conducted.

We shall begin digging deeper in subsequent posts.

Notes and references after the jump.

How religious/spiritual is the American Professoriate? Suggested Readings (3a)

In a previous post, I recommended Gross and Simmons’ 2009 article in Sociology of Religion as the best we currently have on professorial religiosity (or lack thereof). But what if we change the question to “How spiritual is the American Professoriate?” What do we find then?

The best overview on this question is Jennifer A. Lindholm and Helen S. Astin. “Understanding the ‘Interior’ Life of Faculty: How Important is Spirituality?” Religion & Education 33:2 (2006):64-90.

The Lindholm and Astin article is based on the 2004-2005 Triennial National Faculty Survey conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). The publication grows out of the HERI project on “Spirituality in Higher Education,” a subset of which is devoted to “Spirituality and the Professoriate.” It covers in more detail material also treated in the HERI report entitled “Spirituality and the Professoriate.”

I’ll be saying more about the Lindholm and Astin findings next week. For now I want to offer a caution about making too much of the distinction between religion and spirituality. The distinction is important but can be overdrawn.