Paul C. Burns

After degrees in Classical Literature and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, I went on to study Catholic Theology at the University of St. Michael's College during the heady days of Ecumenism in the 1960s. As a consequence of a position as the chair a national committee representing Christian theological students across Canada, the World Council of Churches arranged a scholarship for me to do a graduate program in the Early Church at Oxford. That gave me the opportunity to explore the new approaches to the study of the Late Antique period of Roman Culture and Christianity. From Oxford I went to St. Mark's College and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. There I served as Catholic Chaplain to the University, Instructor in Theology at St. Mark's, and for many years as Instructor and later Director of Arts One, an innovative team-taught Liberal Arts program at UBC. Then I took on a position in the, then, Department of Religious Studies at UBC to teach World Religions and History of Christian Thought. That appointment gave me the opportunity to collaborate with academic colleagues in nine departments to develop a new Majors program in "Religion, Literature and the Arts". To celebrate the tenth anniversary of that program we produced the book on "Jesus in Twentieth-Century Literature, Art and Film". After retiring from UBC I became a founding tutor for five years in the experimental undergraduate institution called Quest University Canada. Now I am back at St. Mark's College as Dean of the undergraduate program. This has given me the opportunity to return to my research and publishing interests in Origen, Hilary, and Augustine. Here I am interested primarily in their ways of promoting growth in the Christian faith of their congregations and audiences through their preaching on Scripture and their use of "life writing" to promote Nicene orthodoxy. These themes and resources inform my book on Hilary of Poitiers on the Psalms. I like to think that my pastoral experience as Chaplain, my long engagement with teaching Christianity in a broad Liberal Arts perspective in secular universities and in a Catholic college, and continuing collaboration with colleagues of diverse religious and academic perspectives provide me with a valuable interpretive lens of major Christian authors shared by many Christian Churches.