Provo, USA - As an animation instructor in Los Angeles, Ryan Woodward couldn't tell his students that when he was struggling he would ride his bike into the mountains and pray for strength. "But when I got to BYU ... I could talk to (students) about my own personal relationship with God and my religion and how that helped me get through being laid off, and artistic challenges and all those things that come up," he said.
While faith-related discussions are common at BYU, many colleges and universities across the country, including those that are not church-related, are recognizing the importance of religion and the ways that faith can intersect with scholarship, said two scholars who recently presented a conference at BYU on that topic.
"Most educators recognize that human beings aren't just material," said Rhonda Jacobsen, a professor of psychology and director of faculty development at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. "There is a spiritual dimension to life. And to have an educational system that doesn't recognize (that) ... is a fairly restricted view of what's appropriate for education."
Faith and scholarship across the country
For 10 years, Rhonda and Douglas Jacobsen, who is also a professor at Messiah College, have studied how faith and scholarship connect as well as how educational institutions deal with religion and spirituality.
Their most recent research initiative, "Religion in the Academy Project" funded by the Lilly Endowment, has taken them to more than 100 campuses — including BYU — to gather data and report their observations.
They first explain three periods in education history: the old soul, where Protestantism dominated the American university; the silent soul, where religion was pushed out of education; and the new soul, which embraces today's pluralistic religious atmosphere.
Often, those who are concerned about the increasing mix of academia and religion simply don't understand the current vocabulary, said Douglas "Jake" Jacobsen, a distinguished professor of church history and theology.
"When they hear the word religion, some think only of the stuff they were taught as kids that perhaps they don't believe anymore," he said. "But usually when we talk to people about the broader spectrum of religious options that are present on campuses we don't meet a whole lot of resistance."
That broader religious definition includes spirituality, self-definition and finding a higher purpose in life.
In fact, 80 percent to 85 percent of entering first-year students want college to be a time of spiritual growth, the Jacobsens said, quoting research from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.
What that spiritual growth looks like will differ between a church-related institution and a public institution, Rhonda Jacobsen pointed out, "but you can have some conversation about religion in both places."
One example would be a required class about the various religions of the world to increase religious literacy, Rhonda Jacobsen said. Professors could also ensure a fertile environment for students' questions on issues they feel pertain to their spiritual growth.
"We do think that paying attention to religious and spiritual things can enhance learning," Douglas Jacobsen said. "Whether you're a person of faith or not, you need to understand how these things can overlap."
Faith and scholarship on the BYU campus
"A lot of people see (faith and scholarship) as tension, a dichotomy," said Steve Turley, a BYU physics professor and symposium presenter. "But what I kept hearing over and over (during the two-day symposium) is that people feel a tremendous sense of freedom by being at BYU and the chance to bring them together and be a whole person."
Brigham Young University is one of the largest of nearly 770 colleges and universities around the country that self-classify as church-related, according to the Jacobsens.
BYU, which is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, prides itself on combining faith and scholarship, said Alan Wilkins, symposium organizer and administrator with BYU's Faculty Center.
The recent conference was an opportunity for faculty to share ideas about how to facilitate faith-filled conversations in their scholastically based classroom, with the goal of having students leave the university as "disciple scholars," as Wilkins called them.
"There is something about what BYU is trying to do in the world that isn't first or only scholarship," Wilkins said. "It's about why we learn all of these things, so we can build the kingdom, build other people, build society."
Yet, there's still not enough discussion on exactly how to do that, he said.
"We're believers," he said. "We really do believe that God exists, that he talks with us, that revelation has occurred in our day and we really are trying to be very good scholars. But what ... it looks like to put those two together is not what you learned in your doctoral program."
Woodward finds that he doesn't have to worry about forcing the two together — they always end up combined in his classroom conversations.
"I never prepare for an overtly spiritual discussion," Woodward said. "I never have a lesson plan or discussion points for the day (that say) we will talk specifically about this, but it always comes up in a critique or in some discussion about the industry, or someone says something about how they're scared to move to L.A. Those kinds of questions fuel the spiritual discussions."
And those discussions can happen in any field, professors say, from art to English and music to math.
Turley emphasized during his presentation that there need not be a disconnect between faith and science.
Scientific knowledge is incomplete and while revealed truth is complete, our understanding of that truth is still incomplete, he explained.
"It leads us to situations where you may end up with things that look like they're in conflict," he said. "The conflict is not because they are two different truths, but because we have an incomplete understanding of the one truth."
Which means that no matter how good a teacher Woodward is, there are still some truths he alone can't convey.
"When we recognize who we are and how we exist in this world, and we recognize there's a God in heaven ... and there's a divine aspect to us, then ... we allow the Spirit to teach us what the textbooks and teachers cannot."