Hooked on Spirituality, Pt 1David Tacey: I think for many students today, spirituality is the only liberation ideology that they can see. In the sense that when I was a student, the liberation ideologies were mainly political, or they were feminist or they were Marxist or they were radical left, or something like that.
We’ve got to realise that what we’re dealing with in youth today is a generation, or some overlapping generations, for whom politics, feminism, the far left, these are almost myths of the past, of belonging to the ‘60s and ‘70s, and many of them despair at politics, and the ability of politics to effect real change and even major feminists are announcing that the feminist era is over. And so what’s left for young people to believe in? What’s left for them to feel is an opportunity for liberation and I think almost by default, Rachael, there’s a sort of sense that spirituality is there as something to explore, to bring personal and also social I think liberation.
You see because what’s happening is a spirituality movement or spirituality revolution which I think is very broad in society. The secular systems of education, health, politics etc. don’t really understand it and therefore often become quite fearful of it. Certainly as yet, there’s been no you might say, systematic attempt in tertiary education to actually grasp this student interest in spirituality.
I think what we’re doing here is rather sort of new and a bit unique. But the church is also suspicious because from almost the opposite point of view, because so much popular spirituality is not churchy and doesn’t fit in to doctrinal lines, so there’s a certain sense in which both our secular education institutions and our institutions of faith, neither of them are quite speaking to this particular hunger, and as a result, there’s tension between the three of them. And that’s what I try to negotiate. Read more in the transcript or download the audio.
David Tacey- At La Trobe University, I teach courses on spirituality and cultural studies, analytical psychology, and literature. I teach a 4th and 5th year subject on the theme of transcendence in contemporary philosophy, depth psychology and literature, and I alternate this with a subject on ecocriticism and environmental psychology.
Another Tacey link
"What I find particularly compelling about David Tacey's argument though is that he is not merely endeavouring to chart why this disjunction has opened up in Western society between religion and spirituality. At the core of this address is a powerful argument about why the decline of institutionalised religion is a bad thing and why we are called to do something about that and reverse the trend. He believes the institutional Church still has an important role to play in society and we are called to a responsibility to redress this situation. His argument though, is not some argument about power. It's about disconnecting religion from the power and allure of human politics and human egos and reconnecting it back to what it ought be connected to — spirituality … the power and allure that is found in the Divine, the ultimate powerhouse that drives, sustains and animates Creation." Brian Coyne PDF of lecture
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