Constructing A Spirituality of Teaching: A Personal Perspective

In the early 1980s, during a long-awaited sabbatical, I, a tenured full professor at a so-called “public ivy,” returned to graduate school to earn a degree in applied ethics and religious studies. In the late 1980s, I took time off to earn still another graduate degree, this one in moral theology. Why, I asked myself, would a person who for so long claimed to be temperamentally indisposed to matters of the spirit spend so much money and energy pursuing further studies in religiously-oriented disciplines? Was this my way of having something “greater than myself to hold onto,” of seizing the “world by the throat” in order to find more to life than I could ever have imagined? At least on the face of it, these degrees had no palpable payoff for my work as a teacher educator. In fact, to this day, I do not even bother to mention them on my Curriculum Vitae for fear of appearing impractical, or worse, intellectually self-indulgent, to colleagues in my professional school.