Fifty years of religious studies in Canada : a personal retrospective / Harold Coward.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Coward, Harold G., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Religion--Study and teaching (Higher)--Canada--History--20th century.

Religion.

Theology--Study and teaching (Higher)--Canada--History--20th century.

Theology.

Universities and colleges--Curricula--Canada--History--20th century.

Universities and colleges.

Universities and colleges--Curricula.

History.

Theology--Study and teaching (Higher).

Religion--Study and teaching (Higher).

Canada.

Physical Description:

xi, 225 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Waterloo, Ontario : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014.

Summary:

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 will be essential to any formal history of the discipline in the future. His story is both personally engaging and richly informative about the development of the field. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Early Days 1

From Theology in Seminaries to Non-sectarian Religious Studies

2 The Golden Decade 1966-1976 13

3 McMaster Days 51

My Personal Experiences of McMaster in THE Early 1970s

4 McMaster's Contribution to Religious Studies in Canada 69

5 Growing into Maturity 81

Development of Religious Studies Department from the Late 1970s to the Present

6 The Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria 145

7 Taking Seriously Our Interdisciplinary Heritage 179

The Future of Religious Studies

8 Conclusion 199.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Other Format:

Coward, Harold G., 1936-, author. Fifty years of religious studies in Canada.

ISBN:

9781771121156

1771121157

9781771121163

1771121165

OCLC:

882190623