BA in Individualized Studies Program
Like many who grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I experienced the shift from an understanding of life based on traditional values to one more directly related to personal experience. This shift turned me into a spiritual vagabond and led me on a number of outer and inner journeys from Western spirituality to ashrams in India to Jungian psychology and to Goddard. Along the way I acquired experience and academic skills that have given me some of the tools for a meaningful reading of the spiritual and cultural systems of the planet. I am interested in any and all religions, spirituality, theology, symbolism, dreams, psychology, philosophy, consciousness studies, ethics, social justice and I love working in education because it is a way of being able to keep my status as a perpetual student.
As an itinerant academic I have taught in a number of universities and colleges and have given a variety of courses, seminars and workshops, most concerned with the spiritual traditions of the planet, and/ or the depth psychological traditions, with an admixture of philosophy. My own orientation in my work as a teacher is to create the right balance between the textual, descriptive, and the experiential. I am also concerned with how the subjects we study relate to our own interiority and to the communities within which we live and work. Those of us who have been privileged with an academic formation have a responsibility to air questions about such matters with our students and colleagues. It also seems to me that the curriculum of Goddard reflects these same concerns.
Educational Background: Ph.D. (Ottawa University) in Psychology and Religion; B.A./M.A. (McGill University) in Religious Studies (Comparative Religion, Philosophy of Religion, Psychology of Religion, Theology). Publications: Spiritualism and the Foundations of C.G. Jung's Psychology (SUNY: 1993) and a number of articles in periodicals.
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Francis Xavier Charet, MA, Ph.D