Australians and the Future of Spirituality

Abstract

Today I would like to consider the topic of Australians and the future of spirituality from a relatively personal point of view. We in academia like to pretend that our views are not 'personal' at all, that we are somehow exempt from the personal equation as we tackle the big issues in our disciplines. But feminism, cultural relativism, and now social constructivism have done much to undermine the idea of a fully objective scholarship, which enables people like myself to address our own 'speaking position' in the conference paper. We can, I hope, learn how to be intelligently personal without indulging our 'personality', and I think the future of scholarship depends on our ability to know the difference between these things.