The Square Root of Minus One: Overcoming Pernicious Dichotomies

This essay argues against misusing spirituality as a way of holding up one side of any number of pernicious dichotomies—associating spirituality with the "heart" rather than the "head," for example or with "practice" instead of "theory," or setting it up in opposition to "religion" itself. Rather than reinforcing such divisions, the field of spirituality ought to be able to resist them and offer an alternatives based on the deep intersection of feeling and thought, theory and practice and on the resources within the field for understanding the spiritual dimension of intellectual work itself.