Abstract

Many Americans identify as religious or spiritual, with a large subset of these individuals identifying as Christian. However, many doctoral training programs neglect to incorporate religion and spirituality into their curricula in an intentional and integrated way. Past national research has documented that many professionals report feeling incompetent, ill-prepared, or reticent to attend to religion and spirituality matters in their teaching and practices. In contrast, Christian doctoral programs address this problem by intentionally hiring qualified faculty who can articulate a clear faith commitment, and through curricular offerings that emphasize the integration of faith and professional practice. By doing so, they offer an approach to doctoral education that incorporates an additional dimension in terms of secular professional diversity standards. Programs like the ones outlined in this article enhance their students’ and trainees’ competency by attending to religion and spirituality as diversity factors. Such programs also attend to religious diversity as an essential personal dimension of life for many clientele. Furthermore, the integration of faith with academic endeavors has the potential to deepen professional identity development and to offer the added layer of integrating occupation and spiritual vocation. Three sample programs are described in this article, highlighting how each doctoral program—one in clinical psychology, one in law, and one in business administration—distinctively practices Christian integration. The benefits of these programs to students and other professional training programs are also discussed.

摘要

许多美国人认为自己是宗教或精神的，其中很大一部分人是基督徒。但是，许多博士培训课程都忽略了有意和综合地将宗教和灵性纳入课程。过去的国家研究表明，许多专业人士表示，在他们的教学和实践中，他们无能为力，准备不足或不愿参加宗教和灵性事务。与此相反，基督教博士课程通过有意聘用可以表达明确信仰承诺的合格教师，并通过强调信仰与专业实践相结合的课程来解决这个问题。通过这样做，他们提供了一种博士教育方法，在世俗专业多样性标准方面纳入了一个额外的维度。像本文中概述的程序那样，通过关注宗教和灵性作为多样性因素，可以增强学生和受训者的能力。此类计划还将宗教多样性视为许多客户生活中必不可少的个人维度。此外，将信仰与学术努力相结合有可能加深专业身份的发展，并提供将职业和精神职业相结合的附加层。本文介绍了三个示例程序，重点介绍了每个博士程序（一个临床心理学，一个法律和一个商务管理）如何与基督教融合。