The adults in our schools need nurturing, too--not just the students. There is great need among faculty and staff for affirmation, healing, encouragement, support, and celebration. Some of those needs can be met through programs and services, others by extending ourselves personally to those with whom we work. This vision paper offers ideas for nurturing the spirits of the faculty and staff, and includes reflection questions, a survey on staff spiritual enrichment, and a bibliography. This monograph was written using insights from teachers and campus ministers from Catholic schools around the country after several three-day workshops titled "The Catholic High School as Faith Community," and more recently, workshops titled "Nurturing Spirituality with Faculty and Staff," sponsored by Saint Mary's Press. Saint Mary's Press grants permission to photocopy this vision paper for use with the faculty and staff in your school, or you may purchase multiple copies for $3.00 each.

Nurturing Child and Adolescent Spirituality: Perspectives from the World's Religious Traditions provides a forum for prominent religious scholars to examine the state of religious knowledge and theological reflection on spiritual development in childhood and adolescence. Featuring essays from thinkers representing the world's major religious traditions, the book introduces new voices, challenges assumptions, raises new questions, and broadens the base of knowledge and investment in this important domain of life. Nurturing Child and Adolescent Spirituality will set the stage for new waves of scholarship and dialogue within and across traditions, disciplines, and cultures that will enrich understanding and strengthen how the world's religious traditions, and others, understand and cultivate the spiritual lives of children and adolescents around the globe.

Children's spiritual development is currently a hot topic in Christian circles, as well as in other fields and disciplines such as educational psychology, medicine, developmental psychology, education, and sociology. The key question for Christian scholars and educators is "How do Christian beliefs and practices uniquely interrelate with children's spirituality?" In 2003 and again in 2006, a national conference entitled "Children's Spirituality Conference: Christian Perspectives" examined children's spirituality from a distinctly Christian standpoint. This book is a collection of the best materials from the 2006 conference. The first half of the book addresses definitional, historical, and theological concerns related to spiritual development in children. The second half explores best practices for fostering spiritual growth among our children--in our homes, families, churches, Christian schools, and among special populations of children--from a wide spectrum of Christian scholars and practitioners. The volume closes with John Westerhoff's moving keynote address and Catherine Stonehouse and Scottie May's eloquent, culminating plenary address. Nurturing Children's Spirituality provides a rich cross section of the current research and writing by Christian scholars on children's spirituality. Contributors: Holly Catterton Allen, Michael J. Anthony, Stacy Berg, Chris J. Boyatzis, MaLesa Breeding, Marilyn Brownlee, Linda V. Callahan, Jane Carr, Mara Lief Crabtree, Karen Crozier, James Riley Estep Jr., Jeffrey E. Feinberg, Stephanie Goins, Judy Harris Helm, Dana Kennamer Hood, Sungwon Kim, Kevin Lawson, Scottie May, Marcia McQuitty, Heidi Schultz Oschwald, Donald Ratcliff, Pam Scranton, Timothy A. Sisemore, Catherine Stonehouse, La Verne Tolbert, T. Wyatt Watkins, John H. Westerhoff III

Brendan Hyde identifies four characteristics of children's spirituality: the felt sense, integrating awareness, weaving the threads of meaning, and spiritual questing. These characteristics can be observed in children if those who work with them know what to look for and are alert to the time, place and space in which children find themselves. This book provides ways in which schoolteachers and parents can nurture and foster these particular characteristics of children's spirituality. It also considers two factors, material pursuit and trivialising, which may inhibit children's expression of their spirituality. Children and Spirituality will be of great interest to educators, policy makers, parents, and others who work with and seek to nurture the spirituality of children.

This book brings together leading academics and practitioners to provide research-informed strategies for nurturing young children as spiritual beings. Globalization and performativity have led to a narrowing of education in early years settings and schools, and this book considers the types of knowledge and capabilities children and educators need to address the challenges this presents. The chapters explore and critique existing practices in a range of areas including sustainability, inclusion, relationships with parents, ethics of care, and the role of the arts. Written by contributors based in Australia, Canada, Malta, Norway, the UK and the USA, the book offers theoretical discussion and practical strategies to help educators nurture young children's spirituality emphasising holistic approaches and caring relationships as an antidote to current neoliberal discourse.

As spirituality first appeared in Australian curriculum documents in 1994, it was important to establish how educators thought it related to student well- being. In this research a description and four accounts of spirituality - spiritual rationalism, monism, dualism, and multidimensional unity - were developed from available literature. The literature also revealed four sets of relationships important to spiritual well-being. These were the relationships of a person with themself, others, environment, and Transcendent Other.

The Sin of Obedience is one of the few works of fiction or non-fiction that looks profoundly and with deep personal reflection into the training of a Catholic priest. The novel, rich and accurate in detail, is the story of a young prodigy torn with between the rigid religious traditions and convictions of his mother and the more-humanity-oriented respect for freedom of his father. Building on his own experiences, including being the subject of sexual abuse by a seminary teacher, the author unfolds a picture of religious life in which the cornerstones of celibacy and a vow of obedience have forced seminarians and priests to make difficult and often impossible decisions in their own personal lives. This well-crafted story enables the reader to go along with a young boy, seminarian and priest on his idealistic pursuit and mission and the consequences he has to face as a result.

Across academic circles over the last few decades, the interest and inquiry on spirituality continues to broaden. Currently, the school system in the United States and many Western countries put their focus on academic achievement at the expense of preparing their students’ inner cores for skills they will need to deal with a more complex and challenging world to come. Supporting Children and Youth Through Spiritual Education provides a platform for researchers and experts in the field of spirituality in children and youth to voice the urgent need for an educational system that truly nurtures the whole child. The book also considers the need to remove the misunderstandings about the terms “spirituality” and “religion” among those who work directly with children and youth. Covering key topics such as religion, cognitive development, and spiritual needs, this reference work is critical for principals, administrators, industry professionals, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

Education is in a constant state of renewal internationally where it responds to a number of pressing social, political and cultural issues. Processes of globalization, a number of conflicts and acts of terror, economic and environmental crises have led to large waves of migration and asylum seekers arriving in countries with the hope of finding safer and more stable places to settle. This, in turn, has led to cultural and religious pluralism being a key characteristic of many societies with corresponding issues of belonging and identity. As well, for many people, there has been a shifting influence of and allegiance away from traditional religious frameworks with the emergence of new religious movements, both peaceful and violent, and a rise in popularity of spirituality and non-religious worldviews which provide alternate frameworks for living healthy and ethical lives. In order to prepare today’s student for tomorrow’s world, one which is confronted by a range of risks and crises and which is being shaped by rapidly changing technologies, educators and researchers are investigating new ways of equipping students to deal with these challenges and opportunities, including the nurturing of spiritual wellbeing. This book brings together the voices of many experienced educators to discuss ways to re-enchant education and re-enliven learning programs in response to these 21st century issues in an increasingly global and interconnected world. It examines a range of international contexts, including secular and religious educational settings, and provides an avenue for visionary voices that identify problems and offer solutions to help shape a more promising education system that will prepare children more constructively and beneficially to flourish in their future worlds.

I will share the inspirations that shape this story as a cosmology into a deeper reflection of what it is to choose our way, and evolve continuously, in nature, nurture and nourishment, moving from immense suffering, through tremendous love and beyond with persistent presence. These stories are in part a personal-memoir, a collection of incredible authors who came before me, and a compassionate expedition exploring the past, present and perennial. All of which follow a soulful quest into self-awareness and our potential for a fulfilled consciousness in becoming more aware, awake, alert and alive in the distinct, dark and divine worlds we exist and play in. I have come to better appreciate the natural world as the process of evolving and creating itself. When I seek questions, answers or wisdom ultimately, I look for natural metaphors and signals in our common elements of nature; space, water, fire, air and earth. The first source of wisdom is nature itself, and that wisdom is perennial as it keeps evolving. We will delve into the sacred space between all things as one of the common elements and is known in Japan as Ma and Sanskrit as Akash. I am no saint, as I have experimented with the three worlds in the divine, dark and distinct. I have strived to make the most balanced choices, and I sometimes choose excess over temperance, egoism over humility, and agitation over patience. When I am persistently present, I can make more balanced choices, and I do make them and then I do not, suspire, perspire and transpire. The manuscript expands on the evolution of a vision I experienced while returning from my hermitage on the Pacific northwest coast. A vision can be like the universe, in that it is evolving through alchemical reactions of self-creating atoms, molecules, and cells. Words evolve in similar ways, from letters, sounds, sentences and phrases into great stories and deeper, more complex meanings and cosmologies. Aldous Huxley said, “Experience is not what happens to a person; it is what a person does with what happens to them.” He paved the way for inclusion and transcendence amongst all cultures and generations and it is because of his sharing stories that we can carry on the development and participation of perennial wisdom, tradition, philosophy and science. Our appetites change over time, tastes evolve, and we hopefully come to better appreciate the company around our banquet table in the garden and beyond. Engaging with others becomes more important than getting a full belly as we find simpler ways to experience nature, nurture, and nourishment. I welcome all who are willing to share in hospitality and possibly even a good squabble. We are never truly alone, there are always realms of energy available to us for relationships in our communities. There are unseen energies that help manifest our dreams, call them conscious agents, conscience, angels or rascals the great news is that we get to choose which energy we participate with in a deliberate determined detailed destiny. I am learning to choose chances for change, participating and expanding in collective consciousness, while seeking the meandering mystic.