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    Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective
    Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective
    Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective
    Ebook371 pages5 hours

    Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective

    By Harold Coward

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    In Canadian universities in the early 1960s, no courses were offered on Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam. Only the study of Christianity was available, usually in a theology program in a church college or seminary. Today almost every university in North America has a religious studies department that offers courses on Western and Eastern religions as well as religion in general. Harold Coward addresses this change in this memoir of his forty-five-year career in the development of religious studies as a new academic field in Canada. He also addresses the shift from theology classes in seminaries to non-sectarian religious studies faculties of arts and humanities; the birth and growth of departments across Canada from the 1960s to the present; the contribution of McMaster University to religious studies in Canada and Coward’s Ph.D. experience there; the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria; and the future of religious studies as a truly interdisciplinary enterprise.

    Coward’s retrospective, while not a history as such, documents information from his varied experience and wide network of colleagues that is essential for a future formal history of the discipline. His story is both personally engaging and richly informative about the development of the field.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateNov 7, 2014
    ISBN9781771121040
    Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective
    Author

    Harold Coward

    Harold Coward is a professor of history and director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria.

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      Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada - Harold Coward

      Index

      PREFACE

      FIFTY YEARS AGO, as the earliest religious studies programs were being established in the arts faculties of Canadian univeristies, I was completing a B.Th. degree in Christian theology at St. Stephen’s College, the United Church Seminary at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Forty-five years ago, I enrolled in the new religious studies graduate program of McMaster University in Hamilton, chaired by George Grant in 1965. There I was, studying world religions, a program that was not available in Canada in 1962 when I began my theology degree. My forty-five year career in religious studies has in many ways paralleled the development of religious studies in the arts/humanities faculties of Canadian universities. In this volume, I offer a personal retrospective of religious studies in Canada over the past fifty years.

      Research for this book really began in the early 1980s when, as vice-president of the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion (CCSR), I convinced Paule Leduc (then president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) to give the CCSR a grant to fund a state-of-the-art review of religious studies in Canada. This resulted in a series of volumes for each region, which I organized and edited during the 1980s and 1990s, all published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. My original idea was to write an overview volume once the regional volumes were all completed, a task I am partially fulfilling with this book. In chapters 2 and 5 I describe the creation of religious studies departments and their development to 2012. What I offer is not a formal history of religious studies in Canada, but a memoir of my involvement in the development of religious studies as a new academic field of study. As such, it is a story of my engagement in the birth and growth of religious studies in Canada that I attempt to present as personally engaging and richly informative about the broad development of the field.

      In Chapter 2 (1966–1976) and Chapter 5 (1970s–2012), I tell the stories of how the various departments of religious studies came into being and have grown into maturity. In telling these stories I found it necessary to include descriptions of the faculty hired (including their specialization and where they did their Ph.D.) to demonstrate the academic strength or weakness in meeting the new religious studies requirements for faculty trained in areas other than theology—areas such as history of religions, comparative religion, philosophy of religion, psychology of religion, sociology/anthropology of religion, and biblical literature—that could offer a program of studies that was open, critical, and inclusive of Eastern and Western as well as Aboriginal religious traditions. These descriptions (lists of faculty, their Ph.D.s, and teaching areas) are foundational data on which I build my analysis and conclusions. It is also important that this information not be lost. In telling about the birth and early growth of religious studies departments across Canada, I found that often there were no archives or written histories. I found the needed information only through personal contact with my wide network of colleagues across the country, many of whom are now aging and dying. For a future formal history of religious studies in Canada, it is essential that this information not be lost. At times reading these lists of faculty and their involvement can become tedious—a problem I have handled as follows. Where the list is simply informative about matters of fact, it is placed in the Notes; where the list contains information important to the narrative and demonstrates the academic strength and breadth of the department being described, it is retained in the text.

      There may be programs I have not included, although I have tried to be as complete as possible (church-based colleges excluded). I leave the task of writing a full formal history of religious studies in Canada for someone else to pursue. But perhaps my after fifty years snapshot will provide a beginning and, at the very least, save useful information from being lost.

      I am grateful to the many colleagues and friends who have helped me in the writing of this book. Patrick Grant, my colleague and friend at the University of Victoria, is the one who, at just the right moment, suggested I write this volume and carefully read my draft manuscript, offering most helpful suggestions for revision. At the UVic Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, Paul Bramadat and Conrad Brunk read the chapter on the Centre (Chapter 6) and suggested revisions. Wayne McCready helpfully critiqued my presentation of graduate work at McMaster (Chapter 3) and the contribution of McMaster to religious studies in Canada (Chapter 4). I am most grateful to the many department chairs and colleagues who, during the fall of 2012, kindly answered my many email queries on the history and current status of their departments. I know that by the time the book appears in print, the information I give for many departments will have changed, but I have tried hard to give a clear picture of the status of each department as it was in 2012. Also, students of my UVic Religious Studies 450 Capstone class listened to sections of various chapters and offered suggestions.

      I wish to thank Brian Henderson and Lisa Quinn of Wilfrid Laurier University Press for encouraging me to write this book. At our Centre, June Thomson gave me valuable assistance in library research. As always, Vicki Simmons, my manuscript typist, carefully attended to the initial typing and various revisions required. Without her careful and efficient assistance, my continued scholarly work would not be possible. Finally, a word of special appreciation to my wife, Rachel, who lovingly supported me in the writing of this and all my previous books.

      Harold Coward

      Centre for Studies in Religion and Society

      University of Victoria

      March 18, 2013

      Chapter 1

      EARLY DAYS

      From Theology in Seminaries

      to Non-sectarian Religious Studies

      RELIGION WAS IMPORTANT in the early history of many Canadian universities and colleges, and has continued to make an important contribution. Early on, seminaries were established to teach ministers and full-time church workers the doctrines and practices of their denominations. Christianity was assumed to be the one true religion, and the denominational formulation of Christian doctrine was regarded as authoritative. Seminaries, together with their residences, were frequently connected to universities, and a seminary degree was usually given the status of a university degree. A few general religion courses, taught by seminary staff, were offered for arts and science students. For example, as an undergraduate psychology major at the University of Alberta in the 1950s, I took a course in Biblical Literature offered by the New Testament professor at St. Stephen’s College, the United Church seminary for the province.

      Growing up in the southern Alberta cities of Calgary and Lethbridge, I was surrounded by Blackfoot and Stoney reserves, and went to school with Mormons and Japanese Canadian Buddhists, so from an early age I was curious about other religions, including the Aboriginal traditions. But seminaries and theology departments were almost exclusively interested in the Christian tradition. One positive outcome of this intense focus on Christianity was that the Biblical Literature course, which I took in the early 1950s, was taught with solid academic rigour using the best social science and humanities methods of study. By introducing me to the academic study of the Bible (with lower and higher criticism), the undergraduate biblical literature course in the Faculty of Arts awakened my nascent interest in the further study of religion, including religions other than Christianity. And that is what I did. After completing B.A. and M.A. degrees in psychology, and working as a vocational counsellor for three years, I entered St. Stephen’s College, completed seminary studies, was ordained by the United Church of Canada, and served the Blairmore, Alberta, pastoral charge for five years before entering the McMaster University Ph.D. program in world religions.

      When seminary professors offered courses such as Biblical Literature or Church History in the arts and science program, many university faculty suspected them of bias, anti-intellectualism, and proselytism. Whether these concerns were justified or not, it is true that the seminaries, in their teaching of future ministers, held their own tradition to be the one true religion, and therefore were much less interested in religion in general. Around 1960, a broad distinction was made within universities between theological and liberal arts studies in religion. Whereas the theological approach taught religion, the liberal arts approach was about religion and it included a comparative study of different religious traditions. This latter approach provided the philosophical prerequisite for new departments of religious studies at McMaster University (1965), McGill (1970), Sir George Williams University (Concordia, 1972), Ottawa (1965), Carleton, and the University of British Columbia (1964) located in faculties of arts and science. A comparative and interdisciplinary approach was taken to religious studies with an attempt to balance Eastern and Western traditions. During the 1960s, other Canadian universities were embracing this new approach and establishing religious studies departments in arts and science faculties, including Memorial (1968), Manitoba (1968), Winnipeg (1966), Regina (1969), Alberta (1967), Brandon (1966), and Université du Québec à Montréal (1969). While my own view is that the academic study of theology is not necessarily closed, narrow, and doctrinaire, especially in the early years, it was important for the new field of religious studies to separate and distance itself from theology (and the church) and present a new approach suitable for study in arts or humanities faculties—an approach characterized as open, critical, and inclusive of the full range of major religions, including the Aboriginal traditions.

      All of this had been prefigured by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who to my mind should be regarded as the father of religious studies in Canada. An historian of religion and an Islamic specialist, Smith, in 1951, organized the Islamic Institute at McGill University to foster academic inter-religious dialogue. Smith’s strategy was to have teachers and students of Islam and other religions share their understandings of each other’s personal faith experience in a setting of mutuality, trust, respect, and equality. Smith’s thesis, developed at the Islamic Institute, is that a new mode for humane knowledge is demonstrated by way of a disciplined corporate self-consciousness that is critical, comprehensive, and global (Smith, 1974, p. 99). This is the human objectivity aspect of a comparative religion approach that moves from a narrow theological perspective focused within a specific religion and its truth claim (studying religion as I did in seminary) to studying about all religions using an interdisciplinary and comparative religious studies approach. Says Smith, the study of comparative religion is the process, now begun, where we human beings learn through critical analysis, empirical enquiry, and collaborative discourse to conceptualize a world in which some of us are Christians, some of us are Muslims, some of us are Hindus, some of us are Jews, some of us are skeptics … and where all of us recognize each other as being rational men (Smith, 1974, p. 100). In 1963 Smith left McGill to become director of Harvard’s new Centre for the Study of World Religions.

      By the early 1970s, most universities across Canada were developing religious studies programs following some version of the comparative, interdisciplinary, and balanced East–West studies model. In general, two approaches developed. The first emulated the example of McMaster University and set up religious studies as an arts and science program de novo without reference to pre-existing theological schools. The second approach saw the establishment of a new religious studies program in arts and science as some form of evolution from pre-existing Christian theological schools (e.g., McGill) and/or programs in Judaic studies (e.g., Manitoba and Concordia). The second approach was usually followed in older universities such as Montreal, Laval, or Toronto, where the university itself may have begun as a church college or seminary. The first approach fit well with universities that, by contrast, saw themselves from the start as secular rather than religious in their foundation—as in the case of many of the new Canadian universities begun during the 1960s (e.g., Université du Québec à Montréal, Carleton, McMaster, Windsor, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Victoria).

      After completing my Ph.D. at McMaster in 1973, I followed the basic idea of the McMaster model by working to establish religious studies programs in two secular universities, namely Calgary in 1976, and Victoria in 2009. During my forty-year career in religious studies in Canada, I have been an external reviewer of some twenty academic religious studies programs at universities across Canada, including Toronto, Carleton, York, McGill, Concordia, Memorial, St. Mary’s, Brandon, Regina, and can attest to the great variety of paths that have been followed in their creation. The basic model adopted by these universities during the 1970s was that religious studies should involve a commitment to religious pluralism and to a comparative approach to all religious traditions, as well as the engagement of humanities and social science methods of study. As George Grant observed in 1968 as chair of McMaster University’s new Department of Religious Studies, from the 1920s to the 1960s Canadian universities had largely excluded the study of religion. While religion had been studied in various departments such as history, philosophy, and literature, said Grant, there were no specialized departments of that name. In Grant’s view, religion is a key element in what it means to be human. Consequently, it should indeed be studied in terms of psychology, sociology, philosophy, literature, or political science, but to restrict its study to such departments would lead to a methodological reductionism (Grant, 1968, pp. 61–62). In the United States, at about the same time as Grant was writing, Claude Welch summarized the need for separate departments of religious studies this way:

      If the phenomena of religion are to be responsibly investigated at the highest level, both kinds of study are essential: the sort that takes place in the context of other constellations of interest, and the kind that occurs when the range of religious phenomena is the primary focus. To say that religion can be studied significantly as part of a program in sociology or Near Eastern studies is not to say that it will be.… In other contexts religion is not often studied well, and sometimes not at all. (Welch, 1971, p. 56)

      The practical point in Welch’s argument for religious studies departments is that in the university things grow only if they are tended, and that means being given an organizing centre, a structure, a budget, some appointee control, and so on (Welch, 1971, pp. 55–56).

      Although these arguments were convincing for most in the 1960s and 1970s, some faculty members opposed the introduction of the study of religion to the arts and science curriculum because of their own earlier experience of religion having often been dogmatically theological and Christian in nature. In addition, teachers of religion were often clergy who lacked the academic training and rigour that university faculty members valued highly. Indeed, I encountered such opposition from senior faculty while introducing religious studies at both Calgary and Victoria, an opposition that required hours of one-on-one meetings and patient exploration as to how the comparative, interdisciplinary study of religion was different from a sectarian theological approach. Once the case had been made and accepted, the new religious studies programs then had to prove themselves in the fields of research, publication, and teaching at the highest academic levels—competitive with history, English, philosophy, and political science. Once it became clear that they could do so (usually managed in the first few years), religious studies was welcomed into the arts and science fold as a strong team player. Moreover, our student enrolments were typically high, helping to generate additional funds for our faculty from the university budget. Also the religious studies faculty research and publication records were often above average for the faculty. Consequently, by the 1970s religious studies as an autonomous university department had shown itself well able to practise high-level scholarly inquiry. Unlike some theology of earlier ecclesiastical institutions, religious studies, at its best, is not closed, defensive, or doctrinaire, but intellectually open, questioning, and critical, and inclusive of Eastern and Western religions, not privileging any.

      This sea change in the academic study of religion was further evidenced by the 1965 formation of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion (CSSR), which coordinated the three existing societies: The Canadian Society of Biblical studies, Canadian Society of Church History, and the Canadian Theological Society. The academically oriented CSSR was the first society connected with religion to join the Learned Societies and to adopt bilingualism. In 1970, the above-mentioned societies formed the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion/Corporation canadienne des sciences religieuses (CCSR), the founding members of this body included President Walter Principe (Toronto); Vice-President Simon Davis (Sudbury); Secretary-Treasurer Martin Rumscheidt (Windsor); and members Robert Culley (McGill), Charles Davis (Sir George Williams), and Norman Wagner (Wilfrid Laurier University). In 1971, the CCSR began publication of the religious studies journal SR: Studies in Religion/sciences religieuses, which succeeded The Canadian Journal of Theology, founded in 1955. In its final issue, The Canadian Journal of Theology editor observed: The academic world has changed. In 1970 a Canadian university which fails to provide for religious studies, Christian and non-Christian, invites the criticism that its curriculum is anachronistic and inadequate (Fairweather, 1970, p. 128).

      The new journal SR was first edited by William Nicholls (University of BC), with Gordon Harland (University of Manitoba) and Michelle Campbell (Université de Montréal) as associate editors, and Marcel Leibovici (Université de Montréal), Joseph McCelland (McGill University), and Roger Nadeau (Université de Sherbrooke) as book review editors. The Editorial Advisory Board included Jean-Paul Audet (Université de Montréal), Gregory Baum (St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto), Anita Caron (Université du Québec à Montréal), Eugene Combs (McMaster University), Charles Davis and Michelle Despland (Sir George Williams–Concordia), Leslie Dewart (St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto), Emil Fackenheim (University of Toronto), Eugene Fairweather (Trinity College, University of Toronto), Langdon Gilkey (University of Chicago), George Grant (McMaster University), James Gustafson (Yale University), Leon Hurvitz (University of BC), George Johnston (McGill University), Alexander Klimov (Université du Québec–Trois-Rivières), Klaus Klostermaier (University of Manitoba), Benoit Lacroix (Institut d’études mediévales, Université de Montréal), Paul Ricoeur (Université de Paris and University of Chicago), Zalman Schacter (University of Manitoba), Ninian Smart (Lancaster University), Wilfred Cantwell Smith (Harvard University), and Earnest Simon (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). This listing exhibits the bilingualism in SR’s founding, an indication of many of the major figures in religious studies in Canada in 1971, and those in the international context of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Israel with whom the SR founders and religious studies in Canada wished to identify.

      In volume 1, number 1 of SR, the editor, William Nichols, lays out a template for the new academic study of religion. Nichols notes that, by 1971, departments of religious studies had been established in most major Canadian universities. As a result of the high level of student interest, many of these departments in the early 1970s had graduate programs along with flourishing undergraduate offerings. Even some doctoral programs were under way. These departments saw religion as a human phenomenon of worldwide scope expressed in diverse cultural forms in different times and places. There was fairly general agreement that the study of religion is a single subject. Although it may be necessary to adopt a wide range of methods in approaching religious phenomena, these methods are broadly applicable to all of the religions (Nicholls, 1971, p. 2). In his editorial, Nichols also observes that although Christianity and Judaism will continue to be studied from within their own communities in theological colleges affiliated with Canadian universities, the newer religious studies departments will also study Judaism and Christianity, but within the context of the study of all the other religions of the world, and of the attempt to understand the nature of the religious phenomenon whenever it appears in human existence.… As we learn about ‘our own’ religions by the same methods we use in understanding ‘other’ religions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, new light will inevitably be shed on both (Nicholls, 1971, p. 2). The new methods, said Nicholls, will place less emphasis on scripture and theology and give more attention to the religious experience they reflect. Increasing attention will be given to spirituality, art, music, literature, and politics—all aspects of our varied approaches to religion as the single subject. Finally, Nicholls writes, The field of religion is almost unique … in its concentration on the most important questions that can face a human being: Why do I exist? Who am I? What may I hope for? To understand how these questions have been answered in so many different outlines and epochs is a demanding discipline, involving linguistic, historical, and interpretive skills … and the ability to mobilize the ancient and modern resources of religion to confront the questions of our troubled time (Nicholls, 1971, p. 3).

      The above questions that Nicholls posed were the very ones that sparked my scholarly quest as a young boy growing up in southern Alberta. I was imprinted early with the silent splendour of nature. The quiet drama of a brilliantly painted sunrise on the prairie sky, broken by the clear sweet sound of the meadowlark, was transcended only by the numinous experience of visiting Waterton National Park and climbing to the top of a mountain, where I was overwhelmed by feelings of insignificance and elation by the vastness of the universe. From that perspective, one does indeed seem to be, as the poet T. S. Eliot puts it, at the still point of the turning world (Eliot, 1952, p. 291). Patterns can be sensed without being clearly seen or understood. There is an aesthetic perception of truth that cannot be conceptually expressed but only pointed to by poets, painters, and musicians. But the external mystery of nature was more than matched by my inner experience of the still point at the centre, as it were, of consciousness itself. I remember one day as a young child of perhaps five or six years being sent to my room by my mother for an afternoon nap. Lying there in silence, I was suddenly overwhelmed with questions: Why? Why am I here? What is the meaning of it all? My life as a scholar in psychology, literature, philosophy, and history of religion has been a quest for answers to these questions. Although my search for answers had begun in psychology, by the early 1960s I was finding the methodological boundaries of graduate work in psychology too restricting. By contrast, the psychological processes involved in language itself captured my attention as a young graduate student. How was it that those lines of Eliot’s poem or Shakespeare’s sonnet, or the Bible functioned as revelations or pointers to revelation? And what was happening within my mind when the question—Why am I here?—struck so profoundly? I entered a Ph.D. program at University College, the University of London, to work with the leading psychologist of the day, Hans Eysenck. But the narrowness of his methodology and of academic psychology in general during the 1950s and 1960s would not sufficiently allow me to pursue the answer to my questions. So I returned to Canada and the University of Alberta, where I enrolled to study Christian theology, the only religion program then available. My rejection of the narrow methodology of empirical psychology (although I continued to read and wrestle with Freud, Jung, and the father of North American psychology, William James) resulted in a return to the humanities, especially to theology and philosophy, where I found ample opportunity to pursue my questions. Growing up in a United Church family gave me an early and strongly formative experience of Christian scripture as a source from which to answer the question Why am I here? The Reformation cry of sola scriptura played an important role in my upbringing, from the parables of Jesus, which my mother told me at a young age, to the literary and historical criticism I encountered in Sunday school and my undergraduate arts course in Biblical Literature.

      What I wanted to know was how scripture had played so powerful a role in my life. How did the word function as revelation—psychologically, philosophically, and theologically? Enrolling in Christian theology seminary studies at the University of Alberta allowed me the freedom to pursue these matters from a Christian perspective. In 1965, at the end of three years of study, my theology professor, Terance Anderson, wanted to send me to Union Theolocial Seminary in New York, the leading Christian college of the day, to study with Paul Tillich and John Bennett, but something held me back. Instead I was ordained as a United Church minister and sent off with my wife and our young family to serve the coal-mining community of Blairmore in the Crow’s Nest Pass of the Rocky Mountains. There, four years later, I listened one day to George Grant speaking on Time as History on the CBC Ideas program (his 1969 CBC Massey Lectures). In those lectures Grant spoke of how, through language, the world and ourselves are opened to us: In all groups of languages, for example the European or the Indic, certain languages such as Sanskrit or Greek appear marvelously to transcend limitation, and so have been thought of as called forth for a universal destiny (Grant, 1969, p. 2).

      Grant goes on to speak about how our liberation through language also confines us. For instance, in the European Western tradition we are tied to thinking of ourselves as living through time and history in a manner that is quite different, for example, from the Indic civilizations (Grant, 1969, p. 2). Hearing George Grant in these lectures engaged me and my questions about language and existence in a way that no one had before. So I wrote and asked if I could come to study with him. His response from McMaster to me in the coal-mining town of Blairmore in the Canadian Rockies was Come!

      McMaster was created as a provincial university in 1957, with the Department of Religious Studies headed by George Grant taking shape in the 1960s. Grant, who came to McMaster from the Department of Philosophy at York University, held that the perennial questions of human existence should occupy a central place in university education. Reductionism was to be avoided and religious traditions were to be allowed to speak in their fullness (Grant, 1968, 60–61). Denominationalism and sectarianism were likewise to be precluded and religion was to be studied in both its Eastern and Western manifestations. Early faculty appointments reflected this balance requirement with Eugene Combs (Hebrew Bible) and A. A. Stephenson (Patristics) hired in the Western side, with J. G. Arapura (Indian Philosophy) and Paul Younger (Hinduism) in Eastern religions. Grant’s rationale for this balance requirement was stated as follows in his 1968 lecture to the Royal Society (Grant, 1968) and summarized by Harold Remus as follows:

      At the undergraduate level, students must acquire some knowledge of the religious history of the West, but concurrently must investigate some other great tradition, great being defined by Grant as exercising a widespread and lasting influence on large areas of the world, in contrast (as he phrased it) to some fairly parochial religion which makes little claim to universality, such as, for example that of the Ojibways. Specifically, Grant mentions Hinduism and Buddhism … which must be approached without assumptions of Western superiority.

      At the graduate level, one needs to balance the need for specialization against the need to think comprehensively about religion. … It follows that a balanced department should make evident through its various members the manifold ways of responding religiously. (Remus, 1992, p. 44)

      Like Wilfred Cantwell Smith before him, Grant stressed the need for first-hand contact with representatives of the religions one is studying. Thus, the McMaster faculty "has over the years included scholars of Asian religions from both East and West,

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