Integrating Spirituality into Professional Education

Abstract

This article examines the task of integrating spirituality into professional education today. Significant socio-demographic, cultural, technological, and ideological trends have called for professional intervention with a spiritual dimension of well-being. As an answer to this call, the author endorses a more openminded professional position in which spirituality can be feasibly integrated into the social work curriculum. This position enables social work educators to adequately address professional dilemmas, such as church-state separation, and complexity of conceptualization issues in their teaching through a multidisciplinary lens of social science. Diverse theoretical and methodological approaches toward topics related to spirituality are recommended.

Key Words:

• Social work education
• spiritual well-being
• multidisciplinary approach
• spirituality
• religion