Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Spirituality makes the grade on campus
According to a recently released national study, the majority of college students across America think about their religious and spiritual beliefs with similar contemplation. The University of California, Los Angeles’ Higher Education Research Institute surveyed about 100,000 freshmen at 236 colleges and universities last year and found that 80 percent were interested in spirituality. Seventy-nine percent said they believe in God.
“In some ways, our society has taken us by surprise,” said Helen Astin, a senior scholar at the institute and co-principal investigator on the study, at a news conference that followed the announcement of survey results. “In the past, we, as well as other researchers and commentators, have thought of college students as materialistic, focused on themselves and very apprehensive about the future. What have we learned through our nation’s study? College students are in a serious search for deeper meaning and purpose in their life.”
And the results of the study, distributed to students at both religious and secular schools, suggests that if their answers don’t match up with other people’s answers, the students don’t seem to mind. More than eight in 10 respondents agreed with the statement, “Non-religious people can be just as moral as religious believers,” and 64 percent agreed with the idea that “most people can grow spiritually without being religious.”
The survey itself asked respondents to separate the concepts of spirituality and religion, using factors like belief in the sacredness of life and whether spirituality is a source of joy as indicators of spirituality. Religiousness was determined by a belief in God, whether students pray and how closely they follow religious teachings in everyday life, among other indicators.
“Over two-thirds report that they pray,” Astin said. “Their prayers are for loved ones, to express gratitude, for forgiveness and for help in solving problems.”
Whether today’s students are actually more in touch with their spiritual sides than were undergrads of the past remains up in the air. The UCLA research, funded by the Templeton Foundation, which also publishes Science & Theology News, was the first longitudinal study of its kind on the subject. Students evaluated themselves in the survey, a subjective format that is sometimes not wholly indicative of reality. Researchers said they would have a fuller picture after a follow-up survey is conducted in 2007, when the students who participated will be in their junior year.
“We’ve been doing these large-scale surveys of freshmen for 38 years, but until this last survey in 2004, we’ve not had much about spirituality and religion in the survey,” said Alexander W. Astin, co-principal investigator with Helen Astin. He added that only recently has spirituality become an acceptable topic for scientific study.
“Most colleges want to say that they develop the whole person, and in the last 20 years there’s been an enormous focus on developing health habits and physical training,” said Helen Astin. “It seems that we just haven’t made equivalent time for the spirit,” she said.
“If you say ‘whole person,’ it’s mind, body and spirit. We’ve become more courageous about putting that on the table.”
All of the findings — from the personal to the political — ring true with Shelli Jankowski-Smith, director of Northeastern’s spiritual life office. “I’ve been working in spiritual life for the past 17 or so years,” she said. “Things have been going beyond tolerance to real acceptance and working together, a desire to get along.”
In response to students’ wanting to distance themselves from much of what is traditionally associated with “religion,” the past two decades have seen a number of schools eschew the term in favor of “spiritual” when offering student services and resources, Jankowski-Smith said.
“I hear this all the time: ‘I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual,’” she said. “Part of our job is to show them maybe those two words aren’t as mutually exclusive as we think they are.”
By Kimberly Roots
http://www.stnews.org/articles.php?article_id=601&category=News
(June 7, 2005)
Kimberly Roots is associate editor at Science & Theology News.
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