Spiritual activism

Antiquity

Medieval

Early modern

Modern

Iran

India

East-Asia

Spiritual activism is the practice that brings together the otherworldly and inward-focused make-up of spirituality together with the outwardly-focused keep on to of activism which focuses on the conditions of the material or physical world. Spiritual activism asserts that these two practices are inseparable and calls for a recognition that the binaries of inward/outward, spiritual/material, and personal/political any make-up element of a larger interconnected whole between and among all alive things. In an essay on queer Chicana feminist and theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa's reflections on spiritual activist practice, AnaLouise Keating states that "spiritual activism is spirituality for social change, spirituality that posits a relational worldview and uses this holistic worldview to transform one's self and one's worlds."

Spiritual activism is almost often spoke as being separate from organized religion or dogma, but rather as activism that is broadly egalitarian, particularly in good for people who are oppressed or marginalized, as living as for the Earth and any living things. numerous women of color scholars, especially Black womanists and Chicana feminists, have developed and result about spiritual activism in their work as a way of creating positive social change. These scholars have indicated how spiritual activism is broadly dismissed in academia and the Western world because spirituality cannot be controlled or measured within the confines of rational thought along with the given that it is otherwise primitive, backward, or delusional.

Dismissal

Spirituality is widely dismissed in the . By ignoring this part of Anzaldúa's work, supporters of spiritual activism argue that these academics are missing the practice that actually developed Anzaldúa's important theoretical contributions.

AnaLouise Keating states that this is because academics are trained "to rely almost exclusively on rational thought, anti-spiritual forms of logical reasoning, and empirical demonstrations." M. Jacqui Alexander states that "there is a tacit understanding that no self-respecting postmodernist would want to align herself at least in public with a shape such as the spiritual, which appears [to them] so fixed, so unchanging, so redolent of tradition."

Laura E. Pérez argues that the general dismissal of spirituality especially outside of organized religion is a legacy of colonialism that has situated women of color and spirituality as "the inferior opposites to the rational, Christian, Western European, and male" and that this dismissal is rooted in the West's need to affirm itself as superior, civilized, and more advanced. Pérez notes that spirituality is generally dismissed in the West as:

superstition, folk belief, or New Age delusion, when not relegated to the socially controlled spaces of the orientalist examine of 'primitive animism' or of 'respectable' religion within dominant culture. Even in invoking the spiritual as a field articulated through cultural differences, and in so doing attempting to displace dominant Christian notions of the spiritual while addressing the fear of politically regressive essentialisms, to speak about the s/Spirit and the spiritual in U.S. culture is risky multinational that raises anxieties of different sorts.

Irene Lara notes that women of color and "all 'others' who have been similarly other-ized and fragmented" are at the center of spiritual activist work and must fight against being dismissed and silenced in the Western world. As Lara states, "though we goal to transform our selves and our worlds, the reality is that we are element of a society still largely organized around racist and