ABSTRACT
I wish to defend the following two claims: first, scholarship and spirituality are intimately connected; second, a better understanding of this connection could assist researchers and scholars in rising above inadequate frameworks and impoverishing assumptions for academic work. There are two different kinds of challenge to what I see as the optimal interaction between scholarship and spirituality, one secular, the other religious. With regard to the first challenge, secular assumptions and frameworks for academic work frequently fail to do justice to the connection between the development of personal virtues, both moral and spiritual, and the attainment of knowledge. With regard to the second challenge, some religious believers fail to do justice to the constructive and creative part played by the enquiring and critical intellect in its engagement with received, even revealed truth. They neglect the important part played by criticism, creativity and controversy in the communication of a religious tradition. Since I have addressed the second challenge elsewhere (Sullivan 2001), it is not considered here.
