Can secularism and spirituality be reconciled at school?

“In French you hear it perfectly: tomber d’accord, to fall into agreement, implies a fall. Reaching agreement is a fall. And managing to sustain a debate without seeking consensus at all costs is the key to a certain elevation that today’s public debate may not allow us to find.”

“The Talmud states that controversy is necessary, that controversy is valid, but that the only winner is the one who, with humility, knows how to listen to the other’s argument, to hear it to the point of being able to defend it before stating his own.”

“When I am asked to define spirituality and what this vague, imprecise word exactly means, I am often tempted to answer that spirituality is just wind. […] But in truth, I believe it is wind in a more literal and even etymological sense.”

“This consciousness of the void is not a theologian’s language. It is not theology; it is a political language, the language of a political battle we must wage today. What defines every fundamentalism we must fight is the illusion of its own fullness.”

“Laïcité is not an absence of religion in the public space. It is not a space closed or forbidden to spirituality. It is, on the contrary, a framework that guarantees that no religion within it will ever take up all the space. It is a guarantee of emptiness.”

“Alteration is a process of alterity. That is what meeting the other means. And education is that even more: a consciousness of what we owe the other in what we have become, and the awareness that we are authentically ourselves only when we know we carry within us something of the other that allows us to be ourselves.”