Chapter 2: Contemplative Method and the Spiritual Core of Higher Education

A major concern in higher education, especially in graduate programs, is that students learn to recognize, understand, and use the methods appropriate to their academic discipline. Boiled down to its essentials, method in academia has to do with conscious choice of one’s grounding assumptions, sources, research techniques, and evaluative criteria for what constitutes good results. In this essay I propose a contemplative approach to method.¹ The essentials of this approach have been developed as a proposal within my own discipline, the study of spirituality, and I have previously made the claim that this approach is normative for this discipline (Frohlich, 2001, 2007). I present it here with a question for the reader’s pondering: Would variants of this methodological approach also bring fresh insights and enhanced practical fruitfulness within other academic disciplines, as well? Underneath this question is another: Is it possible that some of the fundamental issues that challenge many disciplines are also questions of spirituality, at least to some degree?