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Spiritual Life at LC

The Center for Spiritual Life offers and supports a wide variety of opportunities and programs for students and the entire Lewis & Clark community that focus on belonging, becoming, and connecting beyond ourselves. We recognize and celebrate the diversity of the Lewis & Clark community - from deeply religious to spiritual unaffiliated to skeptical.

The Center for Spiritual Life serves students, staff, and faculty at all three campuses: CAS, Grad, and Law. The richness of our conversations and the depth of our connections come from this cross-pollination among spaces that otherwise may not find one another. Whatever your background or journey, we seek to support your life at Lewis & Clark as one that is meaningful.

Words that Guide Us

Belong

The Center for Spiritual Life believes in knowing and being known; loving and being loved. How do you find places and spaces to belong? Operating from a lens of equity and inclusion, we offer programs and support our student-led spiritual life groups, who create vital spaces for belonging. Want to start a new spiritual or religious group? Reach out! We’re here to help. We also work to explore ways of belonging that reach deeper than our identities and our tendency to other those who are different.

Become

The Center for Spiritual Life believes in the transformative power of education, action, and reflection. In this, we engage with the tradition of the Liberal Arts. We want to provide opportunities for us all to become the people we are called to be — not just as an “extracurricular,” but in nourishing the life force that drives us to continue learning. What are you passionate about? What are your gifts and talents that you will bring forth into this world? How are you changing? And how can we support one another with grace in the life-long process of becoming?

Be

How can we sit with what is? With what we are despite what we think we need to become? Part of becoming is getting good at just being — through practice and care. So much pressure is put on us to produce. But we are not what we do. We now have a dedicated Meditation and Prayer Room that is always available for all students and staff to use. This room, located in the lower level of the Flanagan Chapel.

Beyond

Whether being a local community member, a global citizen, and/or a beloved of the Divine, we encourage our Lewis & Clark community to acknowledge what is beyond us and to experience ourselves as part of something more. What are our connections to the land, local ecosystems, this earth, to each other, to more expansive consciousness? With this mindset, we promoting transformative justice, operating with curiosity, and seeking to understand the unfamiliar.

Questions? Ideas? Suggestions?

We’re always in the process of finding our ways with these words. Please contact us at spirituallife@lclark.edu. You can also submit anonymous feedback here.