Abstract

Spiritual development during college has been shown to be important for personal, social, and academic reasons. African American students in an online world religions course practiced six traditional disciplines found in almost all of the world’s religions. The first three disciplines, practiced together for three consecutive weeks, were prayer, fasting, and silence. The second three disciplines, practiced for another three consecutive weeks, were chastity, simplicity, and charity. After each of these three-week periods, students wrote reflection papers on their experiences and connected their practices to spiritual disciplines around the world. Students’ personal accounts of both successes and failures with the project provided them with valuable insights into their own spirituality and with improved interfaith understanding and engagement.