Conference Abstract: Social Work and Social Development 2012More than Intellect/ More than Beds: Social Work, respect for religion and

the secular University

Author: Dr A W (Bill) Anscombe Course Director for Social Work/Senior Lecture Charles Sturt University – Wagga Wagga, Australia

Contact Details: aanscombe@csu.edu.au02 69332631Locked Bag 678 Wagga Wagga 2678 Australia

Abstract: This paper examines “how and when” of respecting and “building spiritual rights and religious beliefs” and grounds this in practice examples within the university context. The data for the paper are drawn from a university sponsored survey research project on multi-faith chaplaincies provision and the author’s doctoral thesis, and experience of building a new inclusive Christian accommodation college within a secular University. It commences with a consideration of three different visual and conceptual configurations to the issue of the ordering of the four commonly described different dimensions of human life. Drawing on the Whewellian concept of “consilience”, the paper then considers the notion of “being” which it argues has an inclusive sense of the “bigger whole”. It further argues that secular universities are well placed to influence society and the social workers and others whom they educate. The findings show the importance and usefulness of the principles of human rights and community development, and dimensions of human life, including intellectual, social, psychological and spiritual for students’ development and well-being. Finally, it suggests implications of the study for social work practice and for other universities.

Three possible models of human beings are here considered. I consider all human beings (persons) to have a constituency that is physiological/organic, mental/emotional, social/relational and spiritual/existential (in the more expansive sense of ontological existentialism) and is slightly different to the IFSW principles, which acknowledge: ‘Social workers should uphold and defend each person’s physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual integrity and well-being’. My understanding of human ‘being’ may be summarised in figure 1:

Social/Relational

Spiritual/Existential

Mental/Emotional

Figure 1 Understanding the Human Being

Models of Human Being

An alternative conception is that human beings are intra-related as follows:

Spiritual/Existential

Social/Relational

Mental/ Emotional

Physical/Organic

Figure 2

Figure 3

An alternate conception is that human beings are intra-related and disconnected as follow:

Spiritual/Existential

Multi-faith Chaplaincy Research

This project was developed at Charles Sturt University (CSU) where the intent was to review the current delivery of Chaplaincy Services, research possible models of service delivery and recommend a model of delivery that could be used across the University. The model needed to recognise the diversity of spirituality and provide equivalence of access to all CSU students. The project was designed to lead to a model that enhanced the spiritual dimensions of students and the staff that was appropriate to a secular university that wished to acknowledge, encourage and develop a holistic approach.

Western Catholics 5,087,117Anglicans 3,716,375Uniting Church 1,135,420Presbyterians 583,402Greek Orthodox 374,751no religion 3,643,811agnosticism 22,130 atheism 31,299Buddhist 418,754Islam 340,389Jewish 88,834 (Australian Bureau of Statistics)

“A rationality that has brought us into the age of nuclear weaponry and global economic meltdown invites some sharp questions, to put it mildly; which has something to do with the revulsion in some quarters against the very idea of reason, against science and the notion of universal values and much else besides. As the Pope has argued several times in recent years, the drift towards relativism and pluralism is not the triumph but the defeat of reason; and as he has also insisted, the response of religious faith should not be to glory in the overthrow of rationality but to reclaim the idea and set it on its ancient foundations once more. To go back to where we started: for the Christian, the idea of the reasonable person is bound up with the conviction that humanity is in the image of God, capable of real and intelligent action, not merely instinct. And that intelligent action is fully itself when it is rooted in self-awareness - which in turn includes the awareness of where we stand in relation to the rest of the universe and, most importantly of all, in relation to what gives the universe itself coherence and harmony, the wisdom of God. ....It sets before that society a picture of the genuinely rational person as one capable of intellectual searching and innovation, just as much as any secular account of rationality might do; but it adds the essential extra insight that rationality is about reverence, healing, humility and, ultimately, love. Universities can't teach love; yet an institution that stifles all the things that nourish love would be a menace... Education is properly to do with the growth of an emotionally as well as intellectually mature self, and the nurture of the rational person needs at least to point to what love might mean, not as a particular passing state of feeling ... but as an entire environment for thinking and relating. … And if universities work, as in some degree they must, for the sake of the shared good of their societies, then it matters that at least some of them bring to that work a clear and radical sense of what that good is and where its foundations are to be sought.” Archbishop of Canterbury

Spalding, in his 2007 paper to the ANZSSA Bi-Annual Conference, says

“In the post-Enlightenment world there are indications that campus ministry is not only welcomed by university authorities but may also become increasingly valued as an integral component of student services. The concern for the church, therefore, is no longer about the problem of secular resistance to religious organisations, but about how to negotiate a role and place for campus ministry which is responsive to both the goals of the church and higher education authorities”.

Figure 4

A new model can be depicted as

Figure 5 Boyce

St Martin’s Residential College - an inclusive hospitality-centred Residential Christian Accommodation College

I have been associated with St Martin’s College for 20 years and Chair/President for 10 years. St Martin's College was established in 1992 through the vision of the Right Reverend Barry Hunter (Anglican Bishop of Riverina), and the generosity of Mr George Tassell whose bequest made possible the building of the first cottage and St Mary’s Chapel. In 1992 the college had one cottage and 8 students. The College was named after the Anglican Church in Moulamein where George Tassell worshipped faithfully for many years. St Martin is a saint from the fourth century and is best known as the Bishop of Tours, France. Notably he cared for the poor, fought for truth, spread the good news of Jesus Christ and lived simply. St Martin was conscripted into the army when he was fifteen. It was while he was in the army that on a bitter winter day, during a severe frost, Martin saw a near naked man at the city gate trembling from the cold begging for charity from passers-by. Seeing that the passers-by took no notice of the man, Martin cut his cloak into two pieces. He gave one half to the beggar and wrapped himself in the other half. While he was sleeping that night, Martin saw Jesus Christ dressed in the piece of cloak he had given away. He heard Jesus say “Martin… has covered me with this garment”. The Motto for St Martin's College is: "Building Hope and Faith". This expresses the College's desire to enable the development of young people who will become leaders in their local churches/religious organizations and communities. The college has a basis of welcoming hospitality and an inclusiveness that seeks to foster the development of the spiritual as well as physical, social/relational and mental/emotional aspects of the students. The College seeks to develop a sense of community and a respect for the spiritual and religious rights of all students while proceeding from an unashamed Christian basis.

Whewellian ConsilienceUnderpinning my belief in building spiritual rights and religious beliefs in the secular University is a commitment to consilience. Wilson (1998, page 8) defined ‘consilience’ as ‘literally a jumping together of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork for explanation’. However, the term was coined by the Anglican Priest/philosopher and scientist William Whewell in 1840 in his publication The Philosophy of Inductive Science. It is interesting to recognise that Whewell was both philosopher/priest and scientist. For him and many others, the sharp distinctions between the arts/humanities and science, between the observable material world and the metaphysical world and between inductive and deductive reasoning and faith either did not exist or were held in tension.

It is necessary to discuss differing views of consilience, the nature of knowledge and the relationship of different forms of knowledge. The original Greek concepts of intrinsic orderliness and unity were to some extent overtaken by the rise of scientific methodology with its consequent increasing fragmentation of knowledge and the development of specialised branches of knowledge. So powerful was the scientific method, that other forms of knowledge and insight and the consilience of knowledge had been lost. CP Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1993) attempted to bridge the gap between the cultures of the sciences and the humanities. In Barfield’s Worlds Apart (1971), he creates a fictional dialogue between a professor of history, theology and ethics and a professor of the physical sciences where the aim is to find an approach to modern problems that reconciles the diverse views of reality that are assumed by different academic disciplines. Joined later by others to form a symposium, the question at the heart of the symposium was whether the sheer bulk of human knowledge demands an ever-increasing specialization and whether that means that human beings are losing sight of the wholeness of life. It is a critical question for social work.

Gould (2003) says:Wilson revived Whewell’s forgotten word and extended its meaning far beyond the original authorial intention into a scheme that Whewell himself had strongly rejected—for Wilson wished to incorporate the humanities into the topmost sciences of a singular reductionist chain, thereby achieving a ‘unification of knowledge’ under an empirical rubric, whereas Whewell regarded the humanities (particularly moral and religious reasoning) as a set of logical and inherently separate ways of knowing. Serious attention to all members of the set may well unify our mental lives by forging a consensus of values and results. However, such a consensus could only emerge from independent contributions, knitted together by serious and generous dialogue among truly different, and equally valid, ways of knowing, each responsible for a swatch on wisdom’s quilt, with the swatches abutting and infringing in gorgeous complex patterns of interaction. The unification cannot occur…by Wilson’s strategy of establishing a single efficacious way of knowing for all disciplines, based on the methods and successes of science, and ultimately devaluing the ‘humanities’ not for any intrinsic difference from other factual domains, but for the status as the most complex empirically study of all. (255)..... The intellectual beauty of Whewellian consilience lies largely in the thrill, even the eeriness, of what fashion calls an ‘aha’ experience—the sudden conversion of confusion into order, not by systemic, stepwise, deductive sequences of logical extensions from existing hypotheses followed by predictions and tests, but rather by an immediate insight that we usually cannot reconstruct in our own psyches because the consilience hits us all at once from the blue, leading us to emote ‘Omigod—all these unco-ordinated facts that have tortured me for years in their miscellany do cohere after all’—the ‘jumping together’ that Whewell called consilience. (257–8)