What room is there for a language of spirituality and the spirit in democratic forms of
education? This is the question posed in this collection of essays by a broad range of scholars
working in education. Beginning with the premise that postmodernism is associated with a
re-spiritualization of culture the authors seek to explore ways in which this
re-spiritualization can be pushed in democratic rather than rightist or fundamentalist
directions. What they celebrate is diversity of progressive traditions and discourses of
spirituality that educators and other cultural workers can draw upon to inform practice even
as they «trouble» all essentialistic notions of spirituality. Together these essays move
democratic education onto a fundamentally new cultural terrain and they suggest that the
metaphor of the journey of the spirit is one of the most enduring and potentially democratic
ways of thinking about what it means to teach and to become educated.
