Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada: A Personal Retrospective: 36 (Editions SR) - Softcover

Harold Coward (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1771121165 ISBN 13: 9781771121163

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1771121165
• ISBN 13: 9781771121163
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240