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You’re right to have realized that a serious engagement with the spiritual life entails a radical shift in one’s thinking about everything else. A commitment to Tradition, together with the initiatic affiliation it presupposes, is not something that can simply be grafted onto an otherwise modernist or post-modernist perspective.
Needless to say, this is an especially crucial fact for would-be academics to consider. In a post earlier this month on “The Pride and Perils of Name Brands“, I lamented the dismal situation facing traditionally minded people who aspire to graduate studies in religion. But it’s important to add that this is just the first of a whole series of obstacles they’re going to face. One must not only get into but get out of graduate school, after all, and then land a tenure-track job, and then actually succeed in gaining tenure—at the schools that still have it, and it’s hard not to wonder how long that may last.
Even then, to be honest, the situation improves only in relatively minor logistical ways—even at an institution like mine, where I’m in fact blessed to have a surprisingly large number of sympathetic colleagues, including a couple of moles in the sciences! Regardless of where he teaches, the tenured traditionalist can no longer be fired for his views (or at least that’s the theory), but he will certainly find himself swimming, throughout his career, against some very strong and very dangerous ideological currents.
By no means the least of these is the increasingly invasive empiricism and scientism of contemporary university culture. This past April I was asked to give a short talk to a group of fellow faculty at my university who’re interested in “dialogue” between religion and science. I used the occasion to shine a bright light on the extent to which professors of religion have capitulated to modern notions of what constitutes knowledge, and to warn the members of this little forum that in the absence of a thoroughgoing reappraisal of what it means to know, any supposed dialogue will simply degenerate into parallel monologues.
In case you’re interested, I have just posted this talk on my website along with some of my other articles and papers. It’s called “Requiring Religion: Be What Knows”.