The Spirit of Community Engagement

Community engagement is more than merely counting instances of interaction with the community however that is defined. A fuller and more sustainable sense of community engagement rests on a recognition that spiritual values and dispositions form the basis of many people sense of belonging to a community and engaging it. Recognising the spiritual and transcendent dimension to community engagement is an important part of taking it seriously and this paper seeks to discuss this in reference to a critique of exclusive secular humanism, calculative rationality and the reduction of meaning that characterises current modern life. We find positive support for the importance of the spiritual dimension to community engagement in reference to both the policy positon of Universiti Sains Malaysia and current research in regards to staff values and spirituality. Ultimately the commitment to community engagement must be grounded in something more than mere utility or achieving some position against metric evaluations. This deeper grounding rests on taking seriously the spiritual dimension to this important topic.