The Soul of Higher Education: Contemplative Pedagogy, Research and Institutional Life for the Twenty-first Century contributes to an understanding of the importance and implications of a contemplative grounding for higher education. It is the fourth in a series entitled Advances in Workplace Spirituality: Theory, Research and Application, which is intended to be an authoritative and comprehensive series in the field. This volume consists of chapters written by noted scholars from both Eastern and Western traditions that shed light on the following questions: What is an appropriate epistemological grounding for contemplative higher education? How dues the current dominant epistemology in higher education mitigate against contemplative teaching, learning, and research? What alternatives can be offered? How can a contemplative culture be nurtured in the classroom? What difference does that culture make in teaching and learning? What is the role of individual and institutional leadership in creating and sustaining this culture? What is contemplative research? How can the emerging field of contemplative studies fit into the twenty-first-century university? What can faculty and students learn from contemplative practices about how to find peace of mind in a world of higher education characterized by increasing complexity, financial pressures, and conflicts? What does a contemplative organizational structure look like in higher education? How can committees, faculty meetings, and administrative teams use contemplative practices to work more effectively together? How can contemplative decision-making processes be used in higher education? Given hierarchies, turf wars, and academics' propensity for using argument as a weapon, is it possible to introduce contemplative practices into decision-making situations in appropriate ways?

This is a new interpretation of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov that scrutinizes it as a performative event (the “polyphony” of the novel) revealing its religious, philosophical, and social meanings through the interplay of mentalités or worldviews that constitute an aesthetic whole. This way of discerning the novel’s social vision of sobornost’ (a unity between harmony and freedom), its vision of hope, and its more subtle sacramental presuppositions, raises Tilley’s interpretation beyond the standard “theology and literature” treatments of the novel and interpretations that treat the novel as providing solutions to philosophical problems. Tilley develops Bakhtin’s thoughtful analysis of the polyphony of the novel using communication theory and readers/hearer response criticism, and by using Bakhtin's operatic image of polyphony to show the error of taking "faith vs. reason", argues that at the end of the novel, the characters learned to carry on, in a quiet shared commitment to memory and hope.