Quote Originally Posted by Penta View Post
Practical linkage, maybe I'm insane: This makes Campus Ministry types an actual tool in the fight against terrorism, then - you really would seem to need clergy/religious in universities that could check students from drifting off in such directions, to act as spiritual directors.
Hmmm, that makes so many assumptions, I'm not sure I even want to touch it !

I think the main "problem" I have with this is the phrase "spiritual director". There's a real assumption here that there actually is a spiritual direction that this person can lead people in and, perhaps most importantly, that anyone wants to go towards. I haven't looked at the stats for a couple of years, but I would guess that they probably haven't changed much in the past 5 or so, which means that probably less than 40% of Canadians believe in any form of spiritual direction coming out of established religions.

Quote Originally Posted by Penta View Post
...Then again, the notion of Campus Ministry as I and probably most people are familiar with it (the friendly campus priest/minister/rabbi/clergytype who's part traditional religious leader, part counselor, part youth group leader) is a distinctly American phenomenon, huh?
Let's see, at Carleton (Ottawa, Canada), we have an Anglican (Episcopalian to you south of the border types ), an RC priest, an Imam, a Rabbi, a couple of Wiccan priestesses and various and assorted others. They really only act as "spiritual directors" to their own groups, although the cookies are usually pretty good in the Chaplaincy .

Marc