School of Religious Studies 2020-2021 NEWSLETTER
Table of Contents 3
Director’s Message
4
School News
18 Faculty Member News 18 Appointments & Promotions 19 Visiting Scholars & Professors
4
Ray L. Hart Bequest
6
Development Statement from Jonathan Birks
7
Lilly Endowment Inc. Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative
8
The Barbara and Patrick Keenan Chair of Interfaith Studies
9
New Partnership with Rangjung Yeshe Institute
9
20 Adjunct, Associate & Affiliate Members 21 Grants & Awards 22 Publications
24 Student News 24 PhD student Awards & Achievements
Graduate Studies News from the Graduate Program Director
10
BA Studies News from the Committee Chair
26 Course Design Competition
10
BTh Studies News from the Committee Chair
27 MA student Awards & Achievements
11
Brian Butcher joins the School of Religious Studies as Adjunct Professor
28 UG student Awards & Achievements
11
Pablo Irizar joins the School of Religious Studies as Faculty Lecturer
29 Publications
30 Graduates 2020
12 Lecture Series
31 Graduates 2021
13 ReOrienting the Global Study of Religion: History, Theology & Society
32 Alumni News
14 Birks Forum on World Religions and Public Policy
34 In Memoriam
14 New Support for Doctoral Students 15 Special Projects Funding
34 Maurice Boutin 36 Allan Youster
16 New Courses
Editor: Francesca Maniaci
Keep in Touch: We encourage you to stay connected with the School and your fellow alumni!
Our Location: William and Henry Birks Building 3520 University Street Montreal, Quebec H3A 2A7 Tel: 514-398-4121 Fax: 514-398-6665
• Subscribe to the School’s Event list to receive invitations to all our events! Email studaffairs.relg@mcgill.ca to subscribe • Follow our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/McGillSRS • Follow our Instagram Account: www.instagram.com/religious_ studies_mcgill/
RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
• Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/McGill_SRS • Subscribe to our Youtube Account: www.youtube.com/user/McGillFRS/ videos • Send us alumni news updates. Submit alumni news by email to studaffairs.relg@mcgill.ca • Keep your contact details up to date on McGill’s Alumni Profile page www.alumni.mcgill.ca/aoc/profileupdate/index.php
Director’s Message
Dear Members of our School of Religious Studies community, Greetings! I sincerely hope that you and your families and friends have remained healthy and safe, and have perhaps even found ways to thrive, during the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic. We have taught and worked remotely from March 2020 through August 2021. The pandemic affected and disrupted nearly all of our activities and events. It also allowed us to conceive others, including this first ever School of Religious Studies Newsletter! We are glad to reintroduce the School of Religious Studies to all of you, as members of our extended community, and to reflect and report on what current students and faculty members of the SRS have accomplished over the past two years! This newsletter emerged from our recognition that we should share our activities and accomplishments more intentionally and widely, to make known our commitments, successes, and directions. In early 2018, while still in the formal threeyear transition from Faculty to School, we were asked by the Provost for a governance document and a five-year strategic plan. The committees that accomplished this work gave the School its long-term strategic goals and orientation. We gave our BA program a thorough revision for the first time in twenty years, and another to our BTh program for the first time in ten years. In 2019, we hosted with our external partners from the Montreal School of Theology an accreditation site visit from the Association of Theological Schools. The result was our first ever, gold standard, ten-year accreditation period. We also increased our graduate program funding packages to
competitive international levels. Each of our committees and faculty members have played a role in these developments. For this period of sustained activity, I remain grateful. We also have added to our faculty ranks since 2018. While the pandemic in 2020-21 slowed some of this momentum, I am grateful to report that with the support of the Faculty and the Provost’s Office, we soon will return to this pattern of new hiring. This dynamism and success in our academic year activities is sufficient reason for a real confidence in the future of the School. And yet, as the following pages will attest, it coincides with a development of real, even historic, significance for Religious Studies at McGill: the Ray L. Hart Bequest. For all of these reasons, we hope that we will emerge from this pandemic period in an even better situation than we were in when we entered into it. We want you to join in our efforts and activities. We hope that this newsletter encourages you to stay actively connected with our community. We are glad to hear from you, our alumni, and friends, and to learn of new developments. Please send us your updates both the “old-fashioned” way and through participation in our social media networks; Facebook and Twitter. Last but not least, your continued support is greatly appreciated. It makes an enormous difference to the quality of learning and student engagement that we can continue to offer. Sincerely Garth Green
DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE | 3
School News
The Ray L. Hart Bequest Ray Hart’s landmark legacy gift will significantly strengthen the School’s reputation as a leader in the field of philosophy of religion. Dr. Ray L. Hart’s credentials in the fields of theology and philosophy of religion are unparalleled. Over the course of his 60-plus year academic and administrative career, he received countless honours and awards, led the founding of over a dozen Religious Studies departments across the United States, and was a prominent figure at the American Academy of Religion, where he served as President, as Chair of the Executive Committee for five years, and as Editor of JAAR for ten years. Indeed, his efforts as architect of a field as well as leader in his subfields encouraged the AAR to establish the Ray L. Hart Service Award in 1992, which is awarded annually for exemplary dedication and service to the field. So when he accepted an invitation from McGill’s School of Religious Studies to serve as a distinguished visiting scholar, he was confident that he knew what to expect. Yet his one-month visit to McGill “was a remarkable and transformative experience for me,” says Hart. He led a graduate student seminar in philosophy of religion, and “it was the best seminar I’d ever been a part of in my life.” As a direct result of that one-month visit, Hart is making an extraordinary gift to McGill’s School of Religious Studies. His generous contribution, included as a bequest in his will, is expected to be the largest gift made to the School since its founding in 1948, as well as one of the largest bequests to McGill in recent history.
4 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
“Although the precise dollar amount of the bequest cannot presently be known, there is no doubt that it will be transformational for the School,” says Professor Garth Green, Director of the School of Religious Studies. “Dr. Hart’s exceptional gift will allow McGill to compete with the world’s leading programs, and will significantly strengthen our capacity in the philosophy of religion.” It was Green who originally invited Hart to serve as a visiting scholar in the Fall 2018 term. Hart joined several seminars – including a discussion of his most recent book, God Being Nothing – where the students made a deep impression on him. “It was the first time it ever occurred to me to make McGill the institutional caretaker of my legacy.” “Our students impressed Ray beyond his expectations,” says Green, “with their linguistic competence, theoretical acumen, and historical comprehension – both philosophical and theological. He came to believe that our graduate students in philosophy of religion were the best he’d seen, and that if we lacked anything, it was only the resources necessary to increase the international impact of our model and efforts.”
of the Graduate Division of Religious and Theological Studies. He and his wife Fern now reside in Montana, on the North Fork of the Flathead River, where they recently celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary.
A living legacy
An American life Hart was born in western Texas, amid the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The third of eight children, “we were as poor as mice, but we didn’t know it,” he recalls. “We grew almost everything we ate, and somehow we managed.” He was close to his paternal grandfather, who never attended school but read constantly. After coming across an article on Yale, the first American university to award a PhD, the elder Hart decided his grandson should attend. Despite the odds, Hart would fulfill his grandfather’s wish. After enrolling at McMurry College in Abilene, Texas, he earned an Arts degree from the University of Texas and a Divinity degree from Southern Methodist University, followed by a Ph.D. from Yale in 1959. At the time, America’s higher education landscape was expanding rapidly. He taught at Drew University, then Vanderbilt, and foresaw a fundamental academic shift. “For generations, leadership in religious studies came from theology or divinity schools,” says Hart. “But with the changes in higher education, even state schools were establishing departments of religious studies, and I wanted to have a hand in their formation.” Thus began his long consulting career serving universities across North America. “Ray is one of the most influential figures of his generation in the field of religious studies and the subfield of philosophy of religion,” says Green. “Although we take the existence and character of religious studies programs for granted today, they exist as such because of his work. It was Ray who brought the American Academy of Religion into the American Council of Learned Societies. Before the 1950s and ’60s, the academic field of religious studies literally didn’t exist.”
Hart has a long history with McGill’s School of Religious Studies; he’d served as a program consultant at various points, and had recommended it to several of his advanced doctoral students. His strongest connection to the School is through its director, Garth Green. The two know each other from Boston University, where Hart supervised Green’s Ph.D. and served as his mentor. Hart has advised approximately 150 Ph.D. candidates during his career. “Ray Hart’s generous legacy gift recognizes the quality of our academics, the excellence of our students, and our distinct approach to religious and theological studies,” says Green. “It will give us the resources required to make this approach more widely known.” McGill is now commencing a fundraising initiative in response to Hart’s extraordinary philanthropy, with a goal of establishing a new endowed Chair in the field of Religion and Literature. Fundraising for a chair in Philosophy of Religion is also expected upon receipt of the Hart estate. “Prof. Hart’s very generous bequest is a clear indication of the value and importance of religious studies at McGill,” says Jonathan Birks, chair of the School’s advisory board and a long-standing collaborator. “He was no doubt influenced by the high quality of the School’s team, curriculum, and reputation.” The School already boasts many strengths: an international network of prestigious academic partners, vital relations with its founding external partners in the Montreal School of Theology, and its recent expansion in the areas of Interfaith Studies and Buddhist Studies. Green is the School’s John W. McConnell Chair in Philosophy of Religion, and the fifth successive chair holder to approach the field in a similar way. All of these qualities have resonated with Hart. “What impressed me about McGill is that it keeps its back bench strong,” he says. “When philosophers retire, they are replaced; there is a perpetual replacement of the values that McGill stands for, and that’s very impressive to me. What I as an individual cannot continue doing, McGill can, and shall.”
Now 92 and retired, Hart’s most recent academic appointment was at Boston University’s School of Theology. He spent over 20 years there in various roles, including Professor, Dean, Chairman of the Department of Religion, and Director
SCHOOL NEWS | 5
Development Statement from Jonathan Birks I am genuinely delighted to have the opportunity to speak about my favourite School within my favourite Canadian University.
I am genuinely delighted to have the opportunity to speak about my favourite School within my favourite Canadian University. These past two years have proved challenging for all of us and I am fiercely proud of the resilience, energy, innovation and pride of the School of Religious Studies ( SRS ) so ably led by its conscientious and industrious Director, Garth Green, who has been so steadfastly supported by an outstanding team of exceptional scholars and very competent and reliable administrative staff. Much has transpired at the SRS during the past few years. The internationally recognized theologian, Professor Ray Hart, visited McGill in the autumn of 2018, to serve as a Visiting Scholar and fell in love with both the SRS and its curriculum, together with McGill University as an institution of higher learning. I had the great honour and pleasure to meet with Professor Hart when he was on campus and was tremendously impressed by his enthusiasm for our School and subsequent desire to offer a transformative gift to it, no doubt influenced by his long-time friendship with its Director, whom
6 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
he had mentored at Boston University and frankly, by the high quality of its team, curriculum and the reputation of McGill. This very generous bequest is certainly a clear indication of the value and importance of the work done in Religious Studies at McGill and an excellent example of what the School of Religious Studies, the Faculty of Arts and the University can accomplish when they work together. Finally, I am very pleased that his bequest will continue the long and distinguished history of important philanthropic gifts to the School, gifts which began in 1948 with the establishment of the Faculty of Divinity in the William and Henry Birks Building, and which include landmark gifts such as the 1948 Chairs, including the McConnell Chair of Philosophy of Religion and the Birks Chair of Comparative Religion, as well as the 2013 gift of the Keenan Chair in Interfaith Studies. Finally, I wish to warmly thank the loyal and effective work of the members of our School Advisory Board. Their ever reliable dedication has been, and is, exemplary. Strong and conscientious leadership; a strong and conscientious academic team; and a strong and conscientious Advisory Board. All components leading to a bright and promising future for the School of Religious Studies. Respectfully submitted, Jonathan Birks
Lilly Endowment Inc. Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative In early April, the School of Religious Studies learned that we had been awarded a $45,000 planning grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc., through its Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative. The initiative is designed to help theological schools in Canada and the United States strengthen their abilities to prepare pastoral leaders for Christian churches into the future. The grant is two-pronged: it will (1) fund research on our teaching of international student cohorts, and (2) enable us to assess the effectiveness and future of our efforts toward the globalisation of Theological Studies, by providing contexts for the discussion and integration of Interfaith Dialogue initiatives. The grant is helping the School of Religious Studies prepare to apply for additional funding from Lilly Endowment through its Pathways Initiative. Theological students at McGill arrive from diverse educational backgrounds and integrate strongly contextualised home church experiences with what can be learned in the critical, international, and ecumenical theological environment of a highly diverse public university, within a mixed consortium of denominational colleges. Experience suggests that students coming from Africa are attracted to McGill because they correctly identify the close relationship here between academic theology and interfaith studies. Experience also suggests that these students commonly face adaptive challenges that are different than those faced by students from countries such as Korea, China, and Taiwan. With the help of McGill’s Teaching and Learning Services, we intend to better understand (1) the institutional process of learning about the needs of our international students, and (2) how best to respond to them. The educational effectiveness and
viability of theological education at McGill may well depend on learning how to better understand the needs and goals of such student groupings. For example: What have we learned, and are we learning, from the numbers of students who come to study with us here at McGill University? How can this instruction, and our perceived lack of training in certain areas, address the needs of those from western as well as non-western backgrounds? The beauty of analysing globalisation through the lens of interfaith dialogue is that each concern is as relevant for students of North America as for students of any country in the world. Insofar as the “neighbourhood” make-up has changed in North America, many congregations are deeply aware of emergent opportunities to enter interfaith dialogues in meaningful and lasting ways. The issue is often seen as fellowship when they ask: How does one bring Christ to the table of fellowship with a neighbour who is concerned with intercity homelessness and hunger but is herself a devout Muslim or Hindu? What means are at our disposal to read each “others’” scriptures in order to understand one another better? Over the years, SRS has built up good and enduring relations with both Christian congregations and congregations of other faiths, the most recent being with the Sikh communities of Canada as they celebrated their 100th anniversary of Guru Nanak’s 550th birth anniversary. We celebrate this opportunity for intra-congregational discussions regarding the education of faith leaders for the future. It also allows us to build on our long history in comparative religion, which has sculpted ways that strengthen interreligious dialogue and interfaith studies and employs these in the context of our BTh program. The School of Religious Studies is grateful to the Lilly Endowment for this grant and opportunity.
SCHOOL NEWS | 7
Professor Salvatore, pictured during his keynote address to “Religion, Secularity, and the Public Sphere in East and Southeast Asia,” with Chairperson Michael Feener (Kyoto University).
The Barbara and Patrick Keenan Chair of Interfaith Studies The Keenan Chair, established through the generosity of the Keenan Foundation in 2013, was a unitwide strategic initiative and development priority of the Faculty of Religious Studies. The Chair extends and innovates our commitment to the comparative method, initiated in 1948 through the Birks Chair of Comparative Religion, and evinces our commitment to an interdisciplinary future for the study of religion, transcending the study of traditions conceived as monolithic blocks, whether individually or in mutual comparison. The fact that the pandemic disrupted or delayed most everything, including the planned activities of the Keenan Chair, Professor Armando Salvatore—currently on a wellearned sabbatical—will not surprise. Professor Salvatore found new ways to communicate with our local, and indeed an international, community. “Re-Orienting the Global Study of Religion: History, Theory, and Society” was conceived as a series of virtual lectures replacing the first Keenan Foundation sponsored conference that was originally scheduled last year. The lectures attracted as many as 600 registrations from around the world. On several occasions, these lectures were the only events in the entire Faculty of Arts event calendar! Professor Salvatore’s persistence as well as international success in this context is remarkable, and appreciated. This inflection of Interfaith Studies proposes an innovation for which few are thoroughly prepared, through their training or in their research orientations. In tandem with partners at such institutions as Duke, Hong Kong, and Kyoto, Professor Salvatore initiated a collaboration that will result in
8 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
a symposium tentatively titled “ReOrienting Cosmopolitan Connectedness: Socio-Political Entanglements and the Religious Imagination”, providing a climactic moment in the year-long series of high-profile events in the Faculty of Arts Bicentennial Celebration sponsored calendar. The School of Religious Studies is complementing the financial support of the Keenan Foundation in order to maximize the size, scope, and impact of the event. The results will add to the impact of this emerging field, to the Keenan Chair itself, as well as the School. The Keenan Chair’s activities include several publications and key contributions to the unit’s teaching economy, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. His graduate supervisory load is the largest of any School of Religious Studies faculty member. His courses at the undergraduate level include “World Religions and the Cultures they Create,” an introductory class in our BA Program which now will become a required course in our BTh program as well. A second introductory course, “Judaism, Christianity, Islam,” has long been one of our most important. But not since the era of W. C. Smith has it been this large, with more than 230 students! The three different religious traditions have always been taught as discreet, by three different professors. Professor Salvatore introduced an Interfaith Studies profile to the class, with a focus on the relation of each to its others and their reciprocal self-constitutions. We are excited to see the effects of this introduction. Already at the end of the Winter 2021 semester, we will have students whose first encounters with Religious Studies — both in “World Religions and the Cultures they Create” and in “Judaism, Christianity, Islam”— will be encounters shaped by an Interfaith Studies horizon — as the legacy gift of the Keenan Foundation had always intended.
New Partnership with Rangjung Yeshe Institute We are delighted to announce that McGill has agreed to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the Rangjung Yeshe Institute (RYI). The RYI is Kathmandu University’s Center for Buddhist Studies, based in the Boudha neighborhood of Kathmandu, Nepal. Founded by Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche as an institution of higher learning for those wishing to deepen their understanding of Buddhist philosophy and practice, the RYI has been conducting seminars and study programs in Nepal for more than 25 years.
McGill students have been studying Classical and Modern Tibetan language, Sanskrit, and an array of Buddhist Studies courses at the RYI for nearly a decade. In addition, Professor Lara Braitstein has enjoyed a long-standing affiliation with the RYI and has spent significant time researching, studying, and teaching there. It is therefore with great joy that we are able to announce this MOU, which will permit deepening ties between our two institutions and bring benefit to students and faculty alike.
Graduate Studies News The Graduate Programs in the School of Religious Studies are thriving. We are happy to announce that despite the Covid-19 pandemic our graduate programs are thriving. We had a new cohort of fifteen graduate students in the Fall 2020 and a cohort of fourteen in the Fall 2021. In the Fall 2020, we welcomed seven exceptionally well qualified candidates to our PhD degree program, and eight to our MA program. Two of our PhD students, Naznin Patel and Matilda Perks, were awarded Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowships, and two more, Daniel Fishley and Lucie Robathan, received Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) fellowships. Amanda Rosini was successful in both competitions, winning both a FRQSC fellowship and a SSHRC fellowship. We were also very pleased to learn that Rachel Kelleher and Ian Plamondon received the Canada Graduate Scholarship for Master’s students. In the Fall 2021, we welcomed seven candidates to our PhD degree program and seven to our MA program. Our new PhD candidates, Benjamin Crosby has been awarded the Richard H. Tomlinson Doctoral Fellowship and Alexandre Dieplam was awarded a FRQSC fellowship. In addition, our PhD candidates Adrien Moevus received a SSHRC
doctoral fellowship and Anna Lee White received a FRQSC fellowship. Two of our MA students, Jessica Gauthier and Alexandre Duceppe-Lenoir were awarded the Canada Graduate Scholarship for Master’s students. As has been the case throughout the university, the Coronavirus pandemic has moved much of our academic exchange into cyberspace for 2020-2021, including graduate seminars and Doctoral Oral Defenses. Our graduate community remained active, however, in a variety of (virtual) ways, from reading groups like the South Asian Religions Reading Group and the Philosophy of Religion Reading Group, to participation in online conferences and social gatherings like the Zoom 5 à 7 organized by our graduate students. Despite the difficulties of working remotely, seven of our PhD students have submitted their thesis and passed their Oral Defences in 2020-2021. As of Fall 2021, there are 42 PhD students and 16 MA students in our graduate programme, a cohort that compares favourably with any other unit in the Faculty of Arts. We were very happy to welcome and integrate our new students in person in the Fall 2021. Torrance Kirby, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Graduate Program Director
Hamsa Stainton, Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions (Hinduism), Chair of Graduate Admissions & Fellowships
SCHOOL NEWS | 9
Bachelor of Arts Studies News New Programs! We are excited to announce that we have three new BA programs and several new courses as of Fall 2020. Our new programs are Major and Minor concentrations and Honours in Religious Studies. Our main objective was to provide students with a simple structure that would allow them the opportunity and flexibility to explore their own interests to the fullest. I wish to take this opportunity to thank the BA committee members and the student representatives on our committee for their hard work and feedback during the program revision process. The new Major and Honours programs now allow students to take up to 12 credits in classical languages as part of their program requirements. This allows undergraduate students, who wish to continue to graduate studies in Religious Studies, to get a head start on their language requirements for their future studies.
take a variety of courses from different fields of study. Each student can now easily create their own program to suit their individual interests and needs. We also revised all our programs to integrate our Catholic Studies courses into our new programs. As of Fall 2021, students will be able to take CATH as well as RELG courses to complete all our BA programs. As a result of Covid-19, Fall 2020 and Winter 2021 undergraduate courses in Religious Studies were offered remotely. Although we have received positive feedback from our BA students on the different ways that each faculty member is adapting their courses to be taught remotely, we were glad to get back to in person teaching and advising in the Fall 2021. Mikael Bauer Assistant Professor of Japanese Religions (Buddhism); Chair, BA Committee
Our Honours program now has a new thesis component which will also allow students to prepare better for future graduate studies. Our new programs provide students flexibility to decide if they want to concentrate on one field of study or to
Bachelor of Theology Studies News The BTh Program committee has been busy over the last few years preparing, with our partners in the Montreal School of Theology, a required self-study in anticipation of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) accreditation site visit that took place in November 2019. We are happy to announce that the result of the ATS site visit in the Fall 2019 was a full 10-year accreditation certification without any notation. In the Fall 2020, the committee completed the long process of revising the BTh program. The goals of revision were to make the program more attractive, while making it easier to grasp and negotiate; to give students more flexibility in choosing complementary and elective courses, while retaining an emphasis on its key disciplines. We are very happy to announce that the new BTh program was approved by the University in April 2021 and is in effect
10 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
as of Fall 2021. The Fall 2021 cohort will be the first students to enroll in the new BTh program. Sadly, we were not able to welcome our new students and welcome back our returning students in person in 2020– 2021 due to Covid-19. On the other hand, reliance on online and web-based advising has actually made it easier for new students to meet with advisors, even before showing up in Montreal. So, with some lessons learned, we are pleased to offer the program in person in Fall 2021. Ian H. Henderson, Associate Professor of New Testament Studies; Chair, BTh Program
Brian Butcher joins the School of Religious Studies as Adjunct Professor Brian A. Butcher arrives at McGill after three years of teaching in the Toronto School of Theology, where he remains a Fellow of the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptysky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies. From 2011-2017, he taught courses at Saint Paul University in Ottawa in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions. As Adjunct Professor of Catholic Studies, Dr. Butcher will bring to the School of Religious Studies expertise in Eastern (-Rite) Catholicism and comparative liturgy. His research interests include sacred music, patristics, philosophical hermeneutics and interreligious dialogue. He will be offering CATH 325, “Mystery and Imagination,” in the Fall 2021 term, and CATH 220, “Rite Makes Might,” in the Winter 2022 term. In 2018, Fordham University Press published his Liturgical Theology After Schmemann: An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur. Other recent publications include ten entries in the forthcoming 4th ed. of The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2021) and chapters in Liturgies: Philosophical Explorations of Embodied Religious Practice (OUP, forthcoming in 2021) and Orthodox Christianity and Gender: Dynamics of Tradition, Culture and Lived Practice (Routledge, 2019). Brian’s professional associations include membership in the American Academy of Religion—where he serves on the steering committee for the Eastern Orthodox Studies Unit—as well as the Society of Oriental Liturgy, the International Society for Orthodox Church Music, and the North American Academy of Liturgy. A subdeacon in the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, he also conducts the Sheptytsky Institute Choir (based at St. John the Baptist Shrine, Ottawa). In addition, he plays the organ and directs the Coram Deo schola at St. George’s Roman Catholic Church (Ottawa). Please join us in welcoming Dr. Butcher to the School of Religious Studies; we are grateful to host his research and teaching!
Pablo Irizar joins the School of Religious Studies as Faculty Lecturer, and Kennedy Smith Chair in Catholic Studies Pablo Irizar was born and raised in Mexico City. He holds a PhD in Philosophy (Paris) and a PhD in Theology and Religious Studies (Leuven) [summa cum laude]. He specializes in early Christianity, the thought of Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux, philosophy of religion, systematic theology, and the Catholic intellectual tradition. He currently serves as Faculty Lecturer of Catholic Studies, as the Kennedy Smith Chair in Catholic Studies at the School of Religious Studies, the director of the Newman Center of McGill University, and as Visiting Professor of Classics and Philosophy at the faculty of Polish and Classic Philology of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He has previously lectured at Corpus Christi College and at St. Mark’s College at UBC, at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy, and at KU Leuven, Belgium. In 2020, Dr. Irizar was awarded the Louvain Studies Theological Research Award for emerging scholars for an article entitled “A Quarantined Church?” He has published extensively in international peer-reviewed academic journals including Louvain Studies, Studies in Spirituality, Augustinus, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, Antigone, Ciudad de Dios, Crossings, Anselm Journal. He is also the author of Reading Augustine on Distance, Belonging, Isolation and the Quarantined Church of Today (Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2022) and co-editor of Religious Polemics and Encounters in Late Antiquity: Boundaries, Conversions and Persuasion (Brill, 2021), The Passions in the Platonic Tradition, Patristics and Late Antiquity (VOX PATRUM, 2022), and Augustine at the North American Patristics Society 2018, (Augustinus, 2019). He will be offering CATH 200, “Introduction to Catholicism”, in the Fall 2021 term, and CATH 335, “Confessions of Saint Augustine”, in the Winter 2022 term. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Irizar to the School of Religious Studies and to the Kennedy Smith Chair in Catholic Studies!
SCHOOL NEWS | 11
Lecture Series
The Islamic Encounters Lecture Series The Islamic Encounters lecture series took place from October 8, 2018 to April 8, 2019. Speakers included Alireza Doostdar, Christopher Silver, Noah Salomon, Damien Jamos, Robert Wisnovsky, Bilal Kuspinar, Kaveh Hemmat, Fatemeh Sadeghi, Michael Nafi, Milad Odabaei, Stefania Pandolfo, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Patrice Brodeur, Setrag Manoukian, Armando Salvatore, Marwa Elshakry.
The South Asian Religions Distinguished Lectureship The South Asian Religions Distinguished Lectureship was established in 2009 to complement the strong undergraduate and graduate programs on South Asia in the School of Religious Studies at McGill, and to encourage public understanding of South Asian religions. It has been made possible through the generosity of Professor Robert Stevenson, Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill from 1966 to 1991. The 2018 South Asian Religions Distinguished Lectureship by Emilia Bachrach, Assistant Professor of Religion, Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Oberlin Colgate and Conservatory, took place on April 26, 2018.
G. Campbell Wadsworth Lectures The G. Campbell Wadsworth Memorial Lecture Series was established in 1997 by the Estate of Dr. G. Campbell Wadsworth. A series of lectures on the life and works of John Calvin is organized on a bi-annual basis. The first G. Campbell Wadsworth Memorial Lecture was presented by Professor Alan J. Torrance. The 2019 Wadsworth Memorial Calvin Lecture by Dr. Richard Rex, took place on September 9.
12 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
Birks Annual Lecture Series An annual series was established in 1950 through the generosity of the late William M. Birks. The lectures are given by distinguished visitors, usually in late September or early October. The first lecturer was the Right Reverend Leslie Hunter. The 2019 Birks Lecturer was Rachel McDermott. Rachel Fell McDermott is Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures and specializes in South Asia, especially India and Bangladesh. She received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981, her MDiv from Harvard Divinity School in 1984, and her PhD from Harvard University in 1993. The next Birks Lectures will be given by Tomoko Masuzawa in 2022. Tomoko Masuzawa is Professor in History and Comparative Literature at University of Michigan.
NEW: Seymour David Steinman Memorial Lecture Established in 2019, in memory of Seymour David Steinman (BA 1959, BCL. 1964) the annual lecture series will focus on contemporary social, moral and political problems that fall at the intersection of the fields of religious studies, Jewish studies, law, and public policy. The first lecture entitled “From Hate to Tolerance: The Prevention of Extremism, Violence, Anti-Semitism & Religious Discrimination” took place in the Fall 2019.
NEW: Miraly Pluralism Lecture Series Established in 2019 to explore issues of pluralism and diversity in secular societies, this series will provide an opportunity for international scholars to engage in studies and dialogue on the aforementioned issues in Religious Studies and Arts, while drawing from other disciplines, such as Law or Medicine, when appropriate in the thematic context of a given year.
ReOrienting the Global Study of Religion: History, Theology & Society Online Lecture Series 2020-2021 & Fall 2021 October 28, 2020 FITZROY MORRISSEY, Oxford University, Ibn Khaldun on Sufism: Mysticism through the Lens of History, Philosophy, and Law.
March 24, 2021 HUSEYIN YILMAZ, George Mason University, Patron Saints of the Rum and their Chosen Dynasty: The Story of Ottomans in Sufi Hagiographies.
November 26, 2020 FLORIAN ZEMMIN, Leipzig University, The Secular in Middle East and Islamicate History.
September 13, 2021 ALI BENMAKHLOUF, Université de Paris Est Creteil, lbn Khaldun: logique et grammaire de la civilisation.
January 7, 2021 DYALA HAMZAH, Université de Montréal, (De)commissioning Ibn Khaldun? Sufis, Statesmen and Publicists during the Long Nineteenth century. January 27, 2021 TIMUR HAMMOND, Syracuse University, Religion In, Of, and From the City. February 17, 2021 BENJAMIN SCHEWEL, Duke University, Imagining the Islamic Ecumene: Marshall Hodgson as Philosopher of History.
Professor Armando Salvatore, the Keenan Chair of Interfaith Studies, and Professor Robert Wisnovsky, the James McGill Professor of Islamic Philosophy, collaborated on an online lecturer series entitled “ReOrienting the Global Study of Religion: History, Theory, and Society” in 2020-2021 & Fall 2021. The series reflected on religion, Islam, and cosmopolitanism associated with McGill’s academic tradition of Islamic Studies, and epitomized by scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Fazlur Rahman, and Toshihiko Izutsu.
WASEEM EL-RAYES, James Madison College, Michigan State University, Nothing Human is Forever: lbn Khaldun and the Morals of Cyclical History. November 18, 2021 SYED FARID ALATAS, National University of Singapore, Ibn Khaldun and Autonomous Knowledge Production. HEBA RAOUF EZZAT, Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, The Tribe and the Nomos of the Earth: The Relevance of Ibn Khaldun.
March 10, 2021 SETRAG MANOUKIAN, McGill University, Towards a Poetic Sociology of Iran.
SCHOOL NEWS | 13
BIRKS FORUM ON WORLD RELIGIONS AND PUBLIC POLICY
Indigeneity and Christianity in Global Context: Troubled Histories and Unsettled Futures Global Christian missionary outreach has been complicit in imperial and colonial projects across the modern period. In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s ‘Calls for Action” (58-61) addressed the role played by Christian churches in the federal government’s colonial projects. Then as today, established forms of Christianity are challenged to expand beyond theological and cultural limitations through a deeper engagement with indigenous traditions and spiritualities. Both indigenous communities and the Christianities have encountered and continue to confront a range of deeply unsettled issues as they attempt to address past histories and chart paths
forward. In this context, the forthcoming Birks Forum webinar series will explore the intersection of Christianity and specific Indigenous communities in a variety of global contexts Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America - historically and today. Keynote speakers will be indigenous leaders and scholars from diverse disciplinary perspectives. While a range of issues — education, environment, gender, reconciliation, peace building — affect diverse indigenous communities in their engagement with Christianity, our webinars will highlight those issues pivotal for each community under discussion.
New Support for Doctoral Students The School of Religious Studies would like to thank Mr. Jonathan Birks, Chair of the School of Religious Studies Advisory Board. The Birks Family Foundation has made an important gift to the School, to support doctoral student research. Beginning in the Academic Year 2021-2022, one advanced doctoral student each year will be named a Birks Family Foundation Scholar, and will receive a financial award. “Everything about this gift is exciting,” Professor Green commented. “The fact that Mr. Birks and the Birks Family
14 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
Black Elk, Lakota prophet and visionary
Foundation continue to find us a worthy destination for their benefaction is exciting. This gift is the most recent in a series that began with the establishment of the Faculty of Divinity in 1948, that includes the historic Birks Reading Room and Birks Chapel, and that involves the Birks Professorship in Comparative Religion, and the Birks Forum for Religion and Public Policy. His Family Foundation has been a leader in the philanthropic community in Montreal, and have supported many important initiatives in and outside of McGill. The model that we have employed, of the School’s matching of the contribution, is also exciting, it allows us to collaborate toward a common goal and maximize the value of our respective contributions. We hope to repeat it in the future. The result, too, is exciting; these funds will be endowed forever, but they will be available already next year to a deserving member of our doctoral cohort.” “This gift has been targeted to an area of real importance for the School of Religious Studies. The high level of sustained excellence in our graduate program is a source of real pride, yet graduate fellowships can be one of the most challenging areas of need to raise resources for,” said Green; “at the same time, they offer immediate and high impact results. We are grateful that we have a friend, partner, and Advisory Board Chair who participates in and contributes to the life of the School as importantly and with as much impact as does Mr. Jonathan Birks.”
Special Projects Funding The School of Religious Studies began a new initiative in 2019-2020: the SRS SPECIAL PROJECTS FUND. Through these funds, the School is providing extra support to its professors to complete a wide variety of projects that will amplify the effectiveness and impact of teaching and research initiatives in each professor’s respective fields. The School funded the projects of 8 different professors between April 2019 and April 2020, including workshops, lectures, and conferences. PROF. ARMANDO SALVATORE took on a project that deals with the scholarly and intellectual legacy of Toshihiko Izutsu (1914-1993). A former McGill professor, his work stood out throughout the 20th century for straddling multiple borders in the academic study of religious traditions. Izutsu was lucidly aware of the global impact of Western thought on the way various traditions/civilizations are studied and communicated. And yet he became a game changer in a variety of regions (North America, the Middle East, East Asia) thanks to his ability to help break through an increasingly suffocating short-circuit: the obsessive face-toface between Western and Islamic views, leading to an inconclusive and circular game of irenic openings and deep-sited conflicts. Prof. Salvatore collaborated with other scholars at two events, namely a movie workshop at Ryukoku University in Kyoto and a conference at University of Oxford. PROF. MIKAEL BAUER utilized special project funds to organize the first (PMJS) Premodern Japanese Studies Network International Conference at McGill. The conference focused on four areas of study: Shinto and Kami, Buddhism and Monasticism, Buddhism and Medicine, and Buddhism and state in pre-modern Japan. The conference was held October 11-13, 2019.
poetry from Tibetan or Sanskrit. The format included research presentations and discussions of precirculated translations. The first session was led by CINTHIA FONT, a visiting scholar and experienced translator and teacher of both colloquial and classical Tibetan.
PROF. PATRICIA G. KIRKPATRICK and PROF. PAMELA MCCARROLL (University of Toronto) co-hosted a colloquium entitled “Christian Theology After Christendom: Engaging the Work of Douglas John Hall”. Engaging and building upon Douglas John Hall’s contextual theology, the colloquium explored constructive possibilities for Christian theology and the church as we face the end of Christendom. Many ‘signs of the times’ point to the necessity for a radically altered Christian witness, with theological moorings that are rooted in solid foundations of biblical and theological interpretation, sensitive to the immense damage inflicted by Christian colonialism. At the same time, these approaches will have to be sufficiently profound to uncover the spiritual malaise of our age and be capable of engaging in dialogue and action with other faiths and systems of meaning that are also committed to the future of global stability and human civilization. The colloquium was held November 1-3, 2019.
PROF. HAMSA STAINTON and PROF. LARA BRAITSTEIN co-hosted a multipart workshop entitled “Translating Devotion: Poetry from Kashmir and Tibet,” which focused on the translation and study of devotional poetry from these two regions. Each session was led by a scholar whose current research relies in part on the translation of devotional
Subsequent sessions were presented and led by the workshop organizers, PROF. LARA BRAITSTEIN and PROF. HAMSA STAINTON, as well as a visiting scholar, PROF. BEN WILLIAMS of Naropa University (USA). The concluding reception for the workshop also served as the book launch for Prof. Stainton’s recently published monograph, Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (Oxford University Press, 2019).
PROF. HEIDI WENDT organized a pair of lectures and workshops on the topic of Christians as Greco-Roman Intellectuals. These events took place on September 27, 2019 and January 30, 2020 with leading interdisciplinary scholars in the fields of Religious Studies and Classics, as well as Hellenistic Philosophy. The invited scholars, PROF. PETER STRUCK and PROF. MAREN NIEHOFF, have done important work on topics pertaining to the complex relationship between religious and intellectual cultures of the Greco-Roman world, albeit with different foci. Each invitee gave a formal talk, followed by a more intimate workshop with a small circle of colleagues and graduate students.
SCHOOL NEWS | 15
New Courses CATH 335 Confessions of Augustine (PABLO IRIZAR)
RELG 211 Theology Through Fiction (DOUGLAS FARROW)
A close reading of Augustine’s monumental Confessions—the odyssey of a restless soul seeking rest in God alone (conf. 1.1.).
Fiction of Christian provenance, in a variety of subgenres, including famous works by the likes of Dostoevsky, Undset, Chesterton, Mauriac, Lewis, Tolkien, Waugh, Greene, Percy, and O’Connor, is both theologically informed and theologically informative.
RELG 358 Religion & Cinema in India (ANDREA PINKNEY) RELG 205 Death & Dying (HILLARY KAELL) This course considers how people in contemporary North America utilise traditional religious concepts and rituals, scientific understandings and medical procedures, or innovative combinations of both to cope with, and make sense of, the problem of death.
Surveys religion in India through key films, assuming no prior knowledge of South Asian cinema. Discussions will focus on issues of religion, visual culture, and representation in the study of Indian film. Thematic focus varies from year to year, on a range of topics such as nationalism, devotion, secularism, and censorship.
16 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
RELG 368 Japanese Religions in Pop Culture (MIKAEL BAUER) Explores the representation of religion in today’s Japanese popular culture. Through the exploration of religious narratives, symbolism and concepts in manga, anime, film and short novels, students will study the way religion is perceived in contemporary Japan. The distinction between the secular and the sacred, and the clash between modernity and Japan’s premodern religious traditions is examined from an historical, anthropological and literary point of view.
RELG 384 Religion & Public Policy
RELG 535 Currents in Philosophy of Religion (JIM KANARIS)
(DANIEL CERE) This course focuses on the intersections between religion and public policy in the North American context. It examines methodological issues at the junction of religious studies and public policy. It explores domestic policy issues related to the religious sphere such as religious freedom, inclusion and accommodation, as well as the evolving impact of diverse religious stakeholders in other policy sectors: education, health care, indigenous rights, immigration, and the environment.
RELG 398 North American Christianity (HILLARY KAELL) North America, as we know it today, was built by a majority Christian population, which has had significant impacts on our current politics, culture, and laws. This course introduces students to four centuries of Christian history in North America, covering grassroots practices and public culture. It focuses on key historical moments and movements, including Puritanism, evangelical revivalism, slavery and Civil Rights, modernism and fundamentalism, Mormonism, anti- Communism, and Pentecostalism.
This seminar brings to bear work of theorists of religion on the philosophy of religion and on theology. It features issues of method that overlap with stages in the study of religion common to both the social sciences and humanities.
RELG 445 Modern Buddhism (RONGDAO LAI)
RELG 611 Issues in Pauline Studies
This course examines how Buddhist doctrines, practices, and texts are (re) interpreted in the process of rapid modernization and globalization, and how Buddhism plays a role in shaping societies, economics, and politics.
(HEIDI WENDT & IAN HENDERSON) A study of Paul and his epistles within their historical contexts and the legacy of both in the development of early Christianity.
RELG 674 Tibetan Life Writings Making Sacred Lives (LARA BRAITSTEIN) This seminar facilitates an in-depth exploration of the development and uses of life writing (auto/biography and hagiography) in the Tibetan context.
RELG 450 The Way of Kami (MIKAEL BAUER) The course offers a historical and phenomenological approach to the study of Shinto, a Japanese indigenous tradition. Through an analysis of the tradition’s premodern and modern history, we will discuss how Shinto changed over its long history and in what way the modern version of the tradition is different from or similar to its premodern counterpart.
RELG 677 Buddha & Kami in Japanese Religions (MIKAEL BAUER) The course Buddha and Kami is an advanced approach to the combinatory practice of “shinbutsu,” or “kami and buddha.” In the modern period Buddhism and Shinto were separated as part of the construction of a new state centred on State Shinto, but throughout its history temples and shrines, monks and shamans, and lay practitioners engaged in a combinatory approach to kami and Buddha.
SCHOOL NEWS | 17
Faculty Member News
Appointments & Promotions In the Fall 2020, we welcomed a new Joint Appointment with Anthropology, PROFESSOR HILLARY KAELL. She has degrees from the University of Toronto and Harvard, and is trained as an Americanist, an Anthropologist, and as a religionist. Dr. Kaell specializes in the history and practice of Christianity in North America, and is the author of several books, including Christian Globalism At Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States (Princeton UP, 2020), Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec (McGill-Queens UP, 2017), Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage (NYU Press, 2014). Professor Kaell has been awarded a William Dawson Research Chair by the Faculty of Arts. She is teaching two courses: RELG 205, “Death and Dying,” and RELG 398, “North American Christianity.” In the Fall 2019, we welcomed a new Joint Appointment with East Asian Studies, PROFESSOR RONGDAO LAI. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from McGill University in 2013, and was based at the University of Southern California before returning to Montreal. Dr. Lai specializes in modern Chinese Religions, focusing especially on the changing landscape in modern Chinese Buddhism and identity production. She acted as co-editor for The Eastern Buddhist feature “Socially Engaged Buddhism” (2014), and is currently completing a book manuscript based on her doctoral dissertation on modern Buddhist education and citizenship in China. Her other on-going project focuses on the networks and transnational movements of Chinese Buddhists in the twentieth century. 18 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
Congratulations to PROFESSOR HEIDI WENDT for her promotion to tenured Associate Professor in Summer 2020. Dr. Heidi Wendt (Associate Professor) joined the School of Religious Studies as an Assistant Professor of Religions of the Greco-Roman World, a joint appointment with the Department of History and Classical Studies. Dr. Wendt completed her PhD in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean and an MA in Classics at Brown University in 2013, as well as an MTS in New Testament and Christian Origins at Harvard Divinity School in 2007. Professor Wendt has been awarded the Distinction in Research, emerging scholars edition in the Faculty of Arts for 2020-2021. Congratulations to PROFESSOR JIM KANARIS on his promotion to Associate Professor (Professional) in Fall 2019. Dr. Kanaris gained a BA in theology and and philosophy from Concordia University in 1993. He continued his studies in philosophy of religion at McGill (MA 1995, PhD (Hon) 2000). Since 2000, Professor Kanaris teaches classes in the areas of theory and method and philosophy of religion at McGill.
Visiting Scholars & Professors PROF. CARLA CANULLO, Associate Professor in Philosophy of Religion at the Università degli Studi di Macerata, was appointed as a Visiting Researcher in Philosophy of Religion for the Fall 2018 term. She is the author of four major books, including the influential 2004 work entitled La fenomenologia rovesciata. Percorsi tentati in Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry e Jean-Louis Chrétien (Rosenberg & Sellier), eight edited books, twenty important translations of leading figures in her research circle in contemporary French phenomenology, thirty articles, and fifty book chapters. PROF. DOUGLAS HEDLEY, (Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge) was appointed Visiting Professor of Philosophy of Religion for the Fall 2018 term. Professor Hedley taught a graduate seminar in Philosophy of Religion and led a Reading Group that included faculty members, as well as graduate students, on F. W. J. Schelling’s Die Weltalter. Professor Hedley made these contributions after having been in residence during Summer 2018 for his AHRC grant collaboration with Professor Torrance Kirby, also of the School of Religious Studies, on The Cambridge Platonists at the Origins of Enlightenment: Texts, Debates, Reception (16501730). We hope that our appointment of Professor Hedley will lead to further and more extensive collaborations.
PROF. RAY L. HART, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy of Religion at Boston University, was appointed as Visiting Scholar in the Fall 2018. President of the American Academy of Religion and Editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR), Prof. Hart is the namesake of a national award given annually (since 1993) as “The Ray L. Hart Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Academic Study of Religion in America” by the AAR. His publications range from the field-defining Unfinished Man and the Imagination (Herder & Herder, 1968), to his most recent God Being Nothing (Chicago, 2017). Professor Hart was last Dean of Boston University School of Theology, where he served also as Chairman of the Department of Religion, and Director of the Graduate Division of Religious and Theological Studies. While at McGill, he wrote a chapter for a Festschrift, consulted with graduate students, and participated in a journée d’étude. We were honoured to host him. DR. PIA-MARIA NIEMI, University Lecturer in Didactics of Religious Education at the University of Helsinki, was appointed as Visiting Scholar in 2018-2019. Dr. Niemi’s post-doctoral grant project allowed her to investigate Quebec state-sponsored religious education programs. She is also a member of a four-year grant team supported by the Finnish Academy, led by the principal investigator Professor Arniika Kuusisto (University of Stockholm, Sweden and University of Helsinki, Finland) and advised by Associate Professor Liam Gearon (University of Oxford).
This project—”Growing Up Radical? The Role of Educational Institutions in Guiding People’s Worldview Constructions”—is closely aligned with work being done in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) and the Faculty of Education, and by Professor Ratna Ghosh. In addition to the affiliation with the School of Religious Studies, Dr. Niemi was invited to collaborate with Professor Ratna Ghosh’s research team during her stay.
ROBERT F. RHODES joined us as the Numata Visiting Professor for the Fall 2019 term, when he taught a class in Pure Land Buddhism. Prior to his retirement, he was professor of Buddhist Studies at Otani University, one of the main Buddhist universities in Kyoto. While at McGill he delivered a lecture on his latest monograph on the Ōjōyōshū , a Pure Land text composed by the monk Genshin (942–1017). PROF. MARTIN SEEGER, Associate Professor of Thai Studies at the University of Leeds, was the Numata Visiting Professor for the Fall 2018 term. He taught a course on Women in Theravada Buddhism and gave a public talk entitled “Autobiographies and Hagiographies of Female Practitioners in Modern Thai Buddhism.”
FACULTY MEMBER NEWS | 19
Adjunct, Associate & Affiliate Members Adjunct Professor: CHUKWUEMEKA ANTHONY ATANSI is a Nigerian theologian. He completed a doctorate in Catholic Theology at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. There, he also obtained two M.A. degrees as well as a STM, each with summa cum laude distinction. His research and teaching specializations lie in the field of African Christianity. He will be in residence at the Newman Center at McGill for the next three years. Associate Member: ERIC CAPLAN is As-
sociate Professor in the Department of Jewish Studies and the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. Professor Caplan received his BA in Jewish Studies and Religious Studies from the University of Toronto, and his MA from the Samuel M. Melton Center for Jewish Education in the Diaspora of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Affiliate Member: PIERPAOLO CICCARELLI
is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Cagliari in Italy. He will be participating in the doctoral-student run Philosophy of Religion Informal Seminar series as well as the Conference of the Canadian Society for Philosophy of Religion. Affiliate Member:
of contingency under the direction of Emil Fackenheim. His areas of interest include the history of 19th century philosophy and philosophy of religion; his research has concentrated on the late German Enlightenment and the early German Romantic period. Kant’s critical philosophy, and especially its aftermath in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, have been the focus of his attention; he has also done extensive work on figures such as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Solomon Maimon, and Karl Leonhard Reinhold. He is the author of Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774-1800 (Cambridge UP, 2005) and a study and translation of Hegel’s “Greater Logic.” His most recent publication is Hegel and the Challenge of Spinoza: A Study in German Idealism, 1801–1831 (Cambridge UP, 2021). He hosted a SSHRC-funded conference on the philosophy and philosophy of religion of F. H. Jacobi with Alex Hampton of the University of Toronto and Paolo Livieri in Fall 2019, and has served as co-supervisor of several doctoral students in Philosophy of Religion in the School of Religious Studies. Affiliate Member: HEATHER McCANCE is Director of Pastoral Studies at the Diocesan College. She is a graduate of the University of Waterloo (B.A.) and Trinity College at the University of Toronto (Master of Divinity and Master of Theology) and has a Doctor of Ministry from Tyndale University.
GEORGE DI GIOVANNI
is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at McGill. He completed his classical studies in Rome at the Ginnasio Torquato Tasso, and his university studies in Germany and Toronto where he received his PhD from the University of Toronto with a thesis on Hegel’s concept
Adjunct Professor: SEAN McGRATH is a
Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He will be teaching RELG 343, “Philosophy and Mysticism,” in Fall 2021. He recently published The Philosoph-
20 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
ical Foundations of the Late Schelling: The Turn to the Positive with Edinburgh Univerity press. Affiliate member: KIEKO OBUSE is a Visiting Researcher at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies in Kobe, Japan. She has an MA in Japanese Religions from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, and a D.Phil in the Study of Religion from the University of Oxford, Faculty of Theology. Affiliate Member: REV. DR. KAREN PETERSEN FINCH is Professor of Pastoral Leadership at The Presbyterian College. Her teaching specializations are in Ecumenical dialogue, Reformed theology (Calvin) and Roman Catholic theology (Bernard Lonergan). Affiliate Member: BENJAMIN SCHEWEL
is Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and Director of the Center on Modernity in Transition. Associate member: ROBERT WISNOVSKY is James McGill Professor of Islamic Philosophy in the Institute of Islamic Studies. He received his BA in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from Yale, and his MA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton. Professor Wisnovsky is currently coorganising two projects with Armando Salvatore: the first project concerns the 14th century Muslim polymath, proto-sociologist and civilizational theorist Ibn Khaldun; the second project explores the theoretical and methodological implications of the legacy of Toshihiko Izutsu, a linguist and scholar of Islamic and comparative philosophy of religion who also taught at McGill in the 1960s and 1970s.
Grants & Awards TORRANCE KIRBY has been awarded a three-year SSHRC Insight Grant with Professor Douglas Hedley, Cambridge Divinity faculty member and Director of the Center for the Study of Platonism, and Professor Garth Green, Director of the McGill School of Religious Studies, for a project entitled “The Reception of German Mysticism in Early Modern England”.
MIKEAL BAUER has organized three conferences on the
study of pre-modern Japanese religion with the support of BDK/Numata Canada and the Japan Foundation. BDK sponsored the 2017 international conference entitled “The Pure Land in the Nara Schools”. In 2018, the conference theme was Buddhism and Ritual Performance in Premodern Japan. The 2019 conference, entitled “Premodern Japanese Studies International Conference”, was supported by the Japan Foundation. The 2020 conference entitled “The Sounds and Colours of Japanese Rites”, which has been rescheduled to 2022 due to Covid-19, is sponsored with a generous Grant for Japanese Studies from the Japan Foundation as part of their Japanese Studies and Intellectual Exchange program, aimed at the promotion of Japanese history and culture overseas. LARA BRAITSTEIN is a member of the FRQSC funded
The project consists in establishing the fundamental influence of German or Rhenish mysticism on English religious thought, chiefly in the 17th century. The project will not only reconstruct for the first time the wide ranging reception of these German thinkers in Early Modern England, but also show that it was through this reception that the influential tradition of ‘German mysticism’ was first created. The project will highlight the international legacy of these authors by adopting the perspective of historico-philosophical engagement with the sources, placing them also in the theological milieu of their time. PATRICIA KIRKPATRICK organized a colloquium in Novem-
ber 2019, in honor of Douglas John Hall, which saw a number of international scholars deliver and discuss the theology of Douglas John Hall. This was a joint venture of two scholars, Professor Patricia G. Kirkpatrick (McGill) and Dr. Pamela R. McCarroll (Emmanuel College, University of Toronto). As part of the colloquium a day long session was given over to the delivery of certain graduate student papers.
research group Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire sur le Tibet et l’Himalaya (GRITH), an initiative that brings together academics in Québec carrying out research about the greater Himalayan region. In addition to Professor Braitstein, the research group consists of Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy (U. de Laval), Chiara Letizia (UQÀM), John Leavitt (U. de Montréal), Marc DesJardins (Concordia), and Thupten Jinpa (McGill).
RONGDAO LAI as a coinvestigator, received a collaborative grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation to work on Buddhism in British Malaya.
GARTH GREEN has been awarded a SSHRC grant to orga-
HAMSA STAINTON received a SSHRC Insight Development
nize an international conference with Professor Jean Grondin (Université de Montreal) on behalf of the Canadian Society of Philosophy Religion on “Metaphysics and Religion.” IAN HENDERSON & GERBERN OEGEMA have received a
SSHRC awarded a grant to to publish these and other papers.
Grant for his project, “Navigating the Ocean of Hymns: Popular Sanskrit and the Historiography of Hinduism”. The project investigates both the history and historiography of the widespread and diverse hymns of praise composed in Sanskrit, focusing on their role in the development of both modern Hinduism and Hindu Studies.
grant to work on the The Contexticon of New Testament Language Project. The Grant provides research stipends for graduate students collaborating in the Contexticon’s work of placing early Christian Greek in its larger linguistic setting.
FACULTY MEMBER NEWS | 21
Publications 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
1. MIKAEL BAUER, The History of the Fujiwara House: A Study and Annotated Translation of the Tōshi Kaden (2020) 2. LARA BRAITSTEIN, Les Chants Adamantins: étude, traduction, et édition critique tibétain (2017) 3. DOUGLAS FARROW, Theological Negotiations: Proposals in Soteriology and Anthropology (2018) 4. DOUGLAS FARROW, 1 and 2 Thessalonians: Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (2020)
5. GAËLLE FIASSE, Amour et Fragilité, Regards philosophiques au coeur de l’humain (2016) 6. GARTH GREEN, co-edited with Jean Grondin, Religion et Vérité: La philosophie de la religion à l’âge séculier (2018) 7. PABLO IRIZAR, Augustine On Distance, Isolation, Belonging and the Quarantined Church of Today (2022) 8. PABLO IRIZAR, Religious Polemics and Encounters in Late Antiquity: Boundaries, Conversions and Persuasion (2021)
22 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
9. HILLARY KAELL, Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States (2020) 10. HILLARY KAELL, ed. Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec (2017) 11. JIM KANARIS, Reconfigurations of Philosophy of Religion: A Possible Future (2018) 12. TORRANCE KIRBY, ed. Sermons at Paul’s Cross, 1521-1642 (2017)
13
14
15
16
17
19
20
21
22
23
13. PATRICIA G. KIRKPATRICK, co-editor with Pamela R. McCarroll, Christian Theology after Christendom, Engaging the Thought of Douglas John Hall (2020) 14. ANDRÉ GAGNÉ, ALAIN GIGNAC, GERBERN S. OEGEMA, (eds.), The Construction of Religious Identities in the Second Temple Period. Festschrift for Jean Duhaime (2016) 15. LORENZO DITOMMASO, GERBERN S. OEGEMA, (eds.), New Vistas on Early Judaism and Christianity. From Enoch to Montreal and Back. Proceedings from the Fifth Enoch Graduate Seminar (2016)
18
16. ANDREA PINKNEY, co-edited book: Religious Journeys in India: Pilgrims, Tourists, and Travelers (2018)
21. HAMSA STAINTON, Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (2019)
17. ARMANDO SALVATORE, The Sociology of Islam: Knowledge, Power and Civility (2016)
22. HAMSA STAINTON, Tantrapuspanjali: Tantric Traditions and Philosophy of Kashmir, co-edited with Bettina Sharada Bäumer (2018)
18. ARMANDO SALVATORE, The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam (2018) 19. ARVIND SHARMA, The Ruler’s Gaze: A Study of British Rule over India from a Saidian Perspective (2018)
23. HEIDI WENDT, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (2016)
20. ARVIND SHARMA, Religious Tolerance: A History (2019)
FACULTY MEMBER NEWS | 23
Student News
PhD Student Awards & Achievements DAVID ANTHONY BASHAM was awarded the 2020 Dirk Smilde Scholarship. The Dirk Smilde Scholarship is designed for PhD students and postdoctoral fellows in Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, Dead Sea Scrolls, and related fields.
Jason is also a DAAD scholarship recipient, which supports the internationalisation of German universities, promotes German studies and the German language abroad. He travelled to Munich to study German. HADI FAKHOURY
LISA BLAKE was named St. Michael’s
College (Vermont) Teaching Fellow in Hinduism. JASON BLAKEBURN
received the Mitacs Globalink Research Award for his project, “The Dark Ground of Metaphysics”. Jason was a BLUE Fellow in the Summer 2019. BLUE Fellows are an initiative from McGill’s Building 21, an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to crafting a new kind of university experience in the 21st century. As a BLUE Fellow, he created a Virtual Reality experience that attempts to represent a particular philosophical conception of nothing.
successfully defended his PhD dissertation on November 2, 2020. He was appointed Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions.
DANIEL HEIDE received the Mitacs Globalink Research Award for his project “The World as Sacrament: The Eucharistic Ontology of Maximos Confessor”.
MICHAEL GOLLNER successfully de-
fended his PhD dissertation on March 5, 2021. NICOLA HAYWARD
successfully defended her PhD dissertation on October 26, 2020. JINGJING LI was awarded the Kather-
ine Young Travel Award to explore how the modernization of Buddhism in early Republican China was not a backlash against Western impact but rather a product of cultural exchanges in Asia. She was awarded the Chung-Hwa Dissertation Fellowship for Graduate Students from The Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies for 2018-2019.
DANIEL FISHLEY received the FRQSC
Doctoral Award. Daniel’s research examines the relationship between Christian mystical theology and contemporary Continental philosophy.
24 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
MARIE-EVE MELANSON is a DAAD
scholarship recipient, which supports the internationalisation of German universities, promotes German studies and the German language abroad. She travelled to Leipzig to study German.
ADRIEN MOEVUS received a Grad-
HELENA
uate Mobility Award to travel to Kathmandu, Nepal, to study Classical and Colloquial Tibetan with native speakers and complete translations.
REDDINGTON
MATTHEW NINI
received a Mitacs McGill Arts Graduate Student Research Award for his research in Summer 2020. Matthew works primarily on 19th century philosophy of religion, particularly German Idealism. He was awarded the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) doctoral fellowship. NAZNIN PATEL received a SSHRC
Doctoral Award. Naznin’s research seeks to map the non-Christian sources in the philosophical works of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), one of the most important and eclectic thinkers of the early Italian Renaissance, and to investigate how these enabled him to conceive and articulate a philosophy of religion that went beyond Christian thought and Greek philosophy.
received a Graduate Mobility Award to travel to Kerala, India, during the summer 2019. She studied Tuḷḷal, a performance tradition which weaves Hindu religious narratives with satire and socio-political critique. She successfully defended her PhD dissertation on June 17, 2021.
Doctoral Award. Matilda’s research focuses on the early Tibetan works of the eleventh Surmang tulku, Chögyam Trungpa (1939/1940 – 1987), a popular if divisive teacher of Tibetan Buddhism in North America, and a figure whose influence has shaped Buddhist modernism.
SIRRI
received a Mitacs McGill Arts Graduate Student Research Award for her research in Summer 2020. She studied the various creation narratives found in the Old Testament in an attempt to develop a womanist approach to ecofeminism and environmental crisis in Africa, particularly in her home country of Cameroon. NEBA
SHAUN RETALLICK successfully de-
fended his PhD dissertation on June 11, 2021. LUCIE ROBATHAN received the FRQSC Doctoral Award. Lucie’s research focuses on the ethicopolitical notion of “epistemic injustice,” to consider how truth is produced within political institutions.
She also won first place for her submission to the CSSR Canadian Society for the Study of Religion Graduate Student Essay Contest (PhD) titled “On Impossibility and Illusions: Desiring Faith in Julia Kristeva.” AMANDA ROSINI was awarded both
MATILDA PERKS received a SSHRC
PRUDENCE
the FRQSC and SSRHC Doctoral Awards. Amanda’s research examines the economic and political conditions that prompted the ancient Israelite community to author the Deuteronomic legal narrative. FAWAZ ABDUL
ADAM SMITH received a MITACS
McGill Arts Graduate Student Research Award for his research in summer 2020. Adam studies Michel Henry and his context within French philosophy of religion more broadly. TSONCHO TSONCHEV
successfully defended his PhD dissertation on December 15, 2020.
ANNA LEE WHITE received two travel awards, the Mitacs Globalink Research Award, and the Katherine Young Travel Award, for research on Hindu bhakti (devotional) literature. She received a FRQSC doctoral fellowship, as well as a Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Award.
SALAM received a Travel Award to conduct research in Istanbul. Fawaz’s research focuses on the role of Muslim discourses and practices in the production of religious and cultural spaces in Istanbul.
STUDENT NEWS | 25
Course Design Competition The McGill School of Religious Studies Course Design Competition was initiated by Professor Hamsa Stainton in 2018 as a professional and academic development program that provides registered doctoral students who have completed their comprehensive exams the opportunity to design and teach an original course during a summer term in preparation for the job market. The program provides doctoral students a new teaching and funding opportunity, one which complements existing opportunities, professional recognition and a prestigious accomplishment that will be valuable on the job market, encouragement for all doctoral students to develop their teaching and course design skills in preparation for their careers beyond McGill as well as develop skills in course marketing and curriculum design.
SUMMER 2018 WINNER: HELENA REDDINGTON Secularism in India A study of secularism in the multi-religious society of India through the nexus of law, society and religion.
SUMMER 2019 WINNER: HADI FAKHOURY Mythologies: from Homer to AI What makes something a myth? What is the difference between a myth and a story? Is myth something irrational? What function does myth serve in social, political and cultural life? How does myth shape perceptions of gender, race and science in culture and society? The course addressed these questions by surveying theoretical and methodological approaches to myth from philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, cultural and media studies, history, and literature.
SUMMER 2020 WINNER: MARIE-EVE MELANSON Freedom of Religion The course offered an overview of issues pertaining to freedom of religion in pluralistic, liberal, democratic states, with a special focus on Canada. Societies committed to the protection of human rights are not only required to protect freedom of religion, they are also tasked with the challenge of defining the limits of religious freedom through law.
WINNERS: LUCIE ROBATHAN AND HELENA REDDINGTON Conversations Across World Religions In the Summer 2020, we ran another course design competition for RELG 332, “Conversations Across World Religions,” which was funded with a donation from the Bronfman Family Foundation.
SUMMER 2021 WINNERS: ANDREW BROCKMAN AND AMANDA ROSINI Bible and Postcolonial Studies: Empire, Exile, and Identity The course examined the biblical perspective of living in a state of exile and how this experience shaped many of the Hebrew biblical narratives.
26 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
MA Student Awards & Achievements IAN PLAMONDON received the CGSM SSHRC. Ian’s research focuses on the secularization process in Quebec and seeks to position the case of Quebec through contemporary theories on secularization. RACHEL KELLEHER received the CGSM SSHRC. Rachel’s research focuses on the intersection of religion, gender, and embodiment. In addition to her studies in medieval mysticism, Rachel has also published on the subject of female genital mutilation and the Western world. In 2020, The Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) hosted a National Essay Challenge, and Rachel’s essay was selected as one of the seven winning entries.
JESSICA GAUTHIER received the CGSM SSHRC. Jessica’s research will focus on the imagery of the Holy Cross as portrayed by Fortunatus against the backdrop of Hilary’s theology and Radegund’s patronage and examine how this relic came to serve an emblem of the conjunction of theology, ritual, rhetoric, and political manoeuvring. Jessica was also awarded the Barbara and Patrick Keenan Experience Award for Interfaith Studies to participate in an online Latin course in Frascati, Italy in the summer 2021. ALEXANDRE DUCEPPE-LENOIR received the CGSM SSHRC. Alexandre’s research focuses on the study of Wiccan magical rituals. His project will define magic in Wiccan terms and determine the ways in which magic is believed to work mechanically and metaphysically in that context. The mechanical aspect of magic will be studied by examining the ways in which magical rituals are conducted.
STUDENT NEWS | 27
UG Student Awards & Achievements SUZANNE BONFILS won second place for her submission to the 2018-2019 Canadian Society for the Study of Religion Undergraduate Essay Contest. Her essay was entitled “The Boy Who Lived (and Loved): An analysis of the Biblical themes of Life and Death and Love in Harry Potter” RYAN BROWN was awarded an ARIA Award under supervision of Prof. Mikael Bauer in the Summer 2021. The project, “Religious Symbols and Narratives in Japanese Pop Culture”, approaches religious content in Japanese manga (comics) and anime (animation) as prime examples of a “matrix of meaning.” YARA COUSSA & AAKANKSHA MATHUR were awarded research stipends to work on the project “Religion, Urban Space and Place-Making in Montreal: Diversifying Montreal in the 20th and 21st Centuries” with Prof. Samuel Nelson in the summer 2021. IAN GREER won first prize for his submission to the 20192020 Canadian Society for the Study of Religion Student Essay Contest. He was invited to attend the Society’s annual meeting to present his paper. The paper was entitled “The Perfect Man in the Philosophy of Zhuangzi and Ibn Arabī” and was written for Prof. Rongdao Lai’s “Chinese Religions” class (RELG 354). KATE GRANTHAM received a Barbara & Patrick Keenan Undergraduate Internship Award for Interfaith Studies in the Summer 2019 to create a comprehensive literature review on the topic of religion and foreign policy in the Global North. The literature review produced from this research project is comprehensive and detailed in its analysis of how religion is impacting international relations.
28 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
SARA MERKER received a Barbara & Patrick Keenan Undergraduate Internship Award for Interfaith Studies in the Summer 2019 to gather evidence aimed at contextualizing the canonical gospels within the Second Sophistic literary period of Rome, roughly dated between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE. The focus of the project was to highlight how the religious and cultural diversity of the Roman Empire during this period is evidenced by various Second Sophistic texts that overtly describe religious entrepreneurs, prophets, diviners, and other authoritative religious figures from diverse backgrounds within the Roman Empire (the modern Middle East, Europe, North Africa). REBECCA PARRY was awarded the Barbara and Patrick Keenan Experience Award for Interfaith Studies to participate in an online Tibetan course at Rangjung Yeshe Institute in the summer 2021. DARCY WANG was awarded the Barbara and Patrick Keenan Experience Award for Interfaith Studies to participate in an online Sanskrit course at Rangjung Yeshe Institute in the summer 2021 JOSHUA WERBER received a Barbara & Patrick Keenan Undergraduate Internship Award for Interfaith Studies in the Summer 2019 to conduct historical research on the development of and dynamics within Montreal’s Catholic parishes between the years 1850 and 1950.
Publications ARC School of Religious Studies Journal Arc is pleased to announce the publication of volume 47, a general submission volume. Laurel Andrew’s piece, “Silence as Resistance and Compliance: Contraception and Catholicism in the United States,” uses a Foucauldian lens to examine the issue of contraceptive access and use amongst contemporary American Catholics. Also looking at American Catholicism is Alexander Nachaj’s piece, “A Modern Saint in the Making: Auto-Hagiography and the Auto-Biography of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.” Speaking to racial dynamics that have been at the forefront of many important discussions lately is Cameron Rowlett’s “In God’s Own Image: Race, Politics, and Millennialism in the Nation of Islam and the Christian Identity Movement,” while Mansour Salsabili’s essay entitled “Religiosity and Violence Reconsidered: Shi’i Ulama Responses to Modernization and the 1906 Constitutional Revolution” seeks to offer a new theoretical lens for understanding certain patterns of violence that occurred during the 1906 Constitutional Revolution in Iran. Ending the volume is Hannah Griffin’s exploration into the funerary literature of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, “(Dis)Order in the Court: Sanctioned Dishonesty in the Hall of Two Maats.”
on the recent pedagogical interest in interreligious studies. “Theological Intonation: Opening Dialogue Between Confessional Theology and Religious Studies,” by Nathan Adams, offers a constructive framework for approaching the disciplinary tension between confessional theology and religious studies. “From Jewish King to Islamic Prophet: Interreligious Conversations about Solomon in Antique Jewish and Islamic Literature,” by Joshua Matson, utilizes a comparative framework to examine the figure of Solomon in early Jewish and Islamic Sources. Katrina Rosie’s piece, “Protective Magic on the Byzantine Periphery: The Development of Apotropaic Devices,” examines the introduction of Christian ideas into the pre-existing ritual efficacy frameworks of Mesopotamia and Egypt in the fourth to seventh centuries CE. Finally, Peng Hai’s Piece, “The Consecration of Madonna and Child: Seeing Religious Art in the Age of Cinematic Mobility,” utilizes ritual theory to examine the popular reception of religious art in the secular space of the modern museum. Editors: Elyse MacLeod (PhD student), Amanda Rosini (PhD student) Book review editors: Adam Smith (PhD student), Anna Lee White (PhD student)
We are also pleased to announce the publication of volume 48, “Cultural and Religious Plurality Within and Across Religions,” a themed volume which seeks to showcase work dealing with the relational complexity that underlies and informs the traditions we study. Samuel Cruz’s piece, “Religions Without Walls: An Ethnography,” offers critical metatheoretical reflections
2020-2021 Advisor: Professor Armando Salvatore 2021-2022 Advisor: Professor Daniel Cere
Canons The Undergraduate Journal of Religious Studies is pleased to announce 2019-2020 edition was published in December 2020. This edition contextualizes the papers within the framework of difference. Beyond research concentrations, this refers to the adaptations in student methodologies of research and learning caused by Covid-19. We would like to thank all of the contributing student authors and editorial team in working to produce a journal through the immeasurable fluctuations of this past year. Applications for the editorial team and paper submissions will be open shortly. Editor: Leora Alcheck, 2019-2020 Advisor: Professor Hamsa Stainton Editor: Matthew Hawkins, 2020-2021 Advisor: Professor Rongdao Lai STUDENT NEWS | 29
2020 Graduates
The 2019-2020 graduates were the first ever to graduate and celebrate remotely. Doctor of Philosophy Darry Dinnell
Master of Arts Anne-Marie de Vreede
Upwardly mobile Mātās: The transformation of Village Goddesses in Gujarat, India Supervisors: Professor Lara Braitstein and Professor Davesh Soneji
The nature of consciousness in Fichte’s philosophy of religion (18041806): a blessed life as the vocation of humankind Supervisor: Professor Garth Green
Paolo Livieri F. H. Jacobi’s “On divine things and their revelation.” A study and translation Supervisors: Professor Garth Green & Professor George Di Giovanni
Master of Sacred Theology Stephen Azundem Oliver Kondeh Ndula Ben Stuchbery
Adrien Moevus To Be Tantric or Not to Be: An evaluation of the modern scholarly debate on Maitrī pa’s Mahāmudrā and a textual analysis of his Amanasikāra cycle Supervisor: Professor Lara Braitstein
James Newman A tale of two kingships: Royal ideology in pre-exilic Judah Supervisor: Professor Patricia Kirkpatrick
Matilda Perks The skylark’s song: Tibetan literary and religious themes in Chögyam Trungpa’s English Poetry Supervisor: Professor Lara Braitstein
30 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
Awards and Prizes W.M. BIRKS AWARD
Master of Arts Josianne Barrette-Moran Roberto Caucci Alexander Dieplam Rachel Kelleher Ian Plamondon
Bachelor of Arts Joshua Werber
Bachelor of Theology Nancy Boillat MARY MYSAK PRIZE IN ASIAN RELIGIONS
Hayley Schwartzberg SANSKRIT PRIZE
Vanessa Acevedo Reyes MCGILL ALUMNAE PRIZE
Nancy Boillat
2021 Graduates
Congratulations to the 2020-2021 graduates!
Awards and Prizes
Doctor of Philosophy Hadi Fakhoury
W.M. BIRKS AWARD
Tsoncho Tsonchev
Master of Arts
F.W.J. Schelling’s Later Philosophy of Religion: A Study and Translation of “Der Monotheismus” Supervisors: Professor Garth Green & Professor George Di Giovanni
Person and communion: the political theology of Nikolai Berdyaev Supervisors: Professor Daniel Cere & Professor Douglas Farrow
Gregory Newing
Michael Gollner
Master of Arts Tahereh Tavakkoli
Bachelor of Theology
The descent of scripture: a history of the Kamikagama Supervisors: Professor Hamsa Stainton & Professor Leslie Orr
Nicola Hayward The use of funerary art for commemorating social identity and memory: The case of the Via Latina’s Samaritan Woman Supervisor: Professor Ian Henderson
Jean Maurais Translated torah: characterizing old Greek deuteronomy as an ancient translation Supervisor: Professor Gerbern Oegema
Killing out of compassion: killing justified by Skillful Means(Upaya) and Esoteric Knowledge (‘Ilm Ladunni) in Buddhism and Islam Supervisors: Professor Lara Braitstein & Professor Mohamad Khan
Emma Paddock
Bachelor of Arts Sophie Sklar
Jacqueline McClaran MARY MYSAK PRIZE IN ASIAN RELIGIONS
Sophie Sklar SANSKRIT PRIZE
Yuchen (Ethan) Hu MCGILL ALUMNAE PRIZE
Jacqueline McClaran NEIL STEWART PRIZE
Albert N. Ho Kersaint Fils Saint-Juste
GRADUATES | 31
Alumni News
VARANT ARSLANIAN (MA 2006) became an Ordained Zen Buddhist monk, head monk at Shogen-ji Zen Monastery in Gifu, Japan. STEPHEN BACKHOUSE (MA 2004) is the Founder and Director of Tent Theology, a venture bringing theological education to local churches and Christian networks across Canada and the UK. (tenttheology.com) His recent publications include: Kierkegaard: A Single Life (Zondervan Harper Collins, 2016); Compact Guide to Christian History (Lion, 2011); Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism (OUP, 2011).
BILAL BAS (PhD 2008) is Associate Professor of the History of Religions in the Faculty of Theology at Marmara University Istanbul, Turkey. JACOB BENJAMINS (MA, 2015) is pursuing his doctoral program at KU Leuven/ Australian Catholic University. He has recently published two articles, one on Paul Ricoeur and another on Jean-Luc Marion.
DREW BILLINGS (PhD 2016) is an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at The University of Mississippi. He recently published a book Acts of the Apostles and the Rhetoric of Roman Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 2017). ANDREW BLAKESLEE (PhD 2011), SCOTT HALSE (PhD 2008) and DAVID KOLOSZYC (PhD 2010) are Instructors in the Department of Humanities at Vanier College, Montreal. MELISSA ANNE -MARIE CURLEY (PhD 2009) is Assistant Professor and Graduate Studies Chair in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. She published Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017). HALEY DINEL (BTH 2014) was hired as the Continuing Education and Events Coordinator at Emmanuel College, University of Toronto.
32 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
BRANDON GALLAHER (MA 2001) is a Senior Lecturer of Systematic and Comparative Theology at the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Exeter. ELIZABETH GILLAN MUIR (PhD 1990) published A Women’s History of the Christian Church, two thousand years of female leadership, (University of Toronto Press, 2019). JULI GITTINGER (PhD 2015) is a Lecturer in South Asian Religions and Islam at Georgia College, USA. She has published Personhood in Science Fiction: Religious and Philosophical Considerations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). STEVEN GRIFFIN (PhD 2011) teaches at the Alexandria School of Theology in Cairo and serves as an assistant minister at All Saints Cathedral in Zamalek. JOSHUA HOLLMANN (PhD 2014) is Chair of the Theology Department and Assistant Professor of Theology at Concordia College in New York.
RONGDAO LAI (PhD 2014) was appointed Assistant Professor in School of Religion at University of Southern California before her recent return to McGill.
JEAN MAURAIS (PhD 2020) is Assistant Professor of Old Testament at the Faculté de Théologie Évangélique, an affiliated college of Acadia University located in Montreal.
ELIZA ROSENBERG (PhD 2015) is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in World Religions and teaches Biblical Studies, Judaism, and Christianity at Utah State University.
JINGJING LI (PhD 2019) was appointed as Universitair Docent, analogous to an Assistant Professor in the North American system, at Leiden University’s Institute for Philosophy.
ROWSHAN NEMAZEE (PhD 2008) is Associate Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College, VT.
SHAYNA SHEINFELD (PhD 2015) co-edited Gender and Second-Temple Judaism (Lexington Books, 2020). She has been appointed a Research Fellow at Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. for 2021–2022.
PAOLO LIVIERI (PhD 2019) completed a Post-Doc at RWTH Aachen University, Institut für Katholosche Theologie, as Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter für Religionsphilosophie. The greatest part of his activity was dedicated to research, which involved F. H. Jacobi’s Philosophy of Religion, G. W. F. Hegel’s Logic, and Contemporary History of Philosophy. He received the 日本学 術 振興会 - JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for Overseas Researchers. Paolo earned this highly competitive position among hundreds of other candidates from around the world in all fields of humanities and social sciences. After the completion of his Post-Doc at Aachen Universität (RWTH), he will be teaching and doing research at Hosei University (法政大学, Hōs ei daigaku, Tokyo). NATHAN R. B. LOEWEN (PhD 2009) is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He published Beyond the Problem of Evil: Derrida and Anglophone Philosophy of Religion (Lexington Books, 2018).
JENNIFER OTTO (PhD 2014) is Assistant Professor of Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. She published Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writing (Oxford University Press, 2018). ERIC PARKER (PhD 2018) published an edited volume on Nicholas of Cusa, and was hired as Rector of St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Lexington, VA.
SARA PARKS (PhD 2016) was Leverhulme Research Fellow working on misogyny and anti-Judaism in early Christianity, and Assistant Professor in New Testament Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. In 2021, she was appointed as Assistant Professor in Biblical Studies (New Testament), Dublin City University, Ireland. SARA PARKS (PhD 2015), SHAYNA SHEINFELD (PhD 2015) and MEREDITH WARREN (PhD 2014) have published Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean (Routledge, December 2021)
JULIA STENZEL (PhD, 2019) is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at Rangjung Yeshe Institute, Kathmandu. Her current research focuses on the critical analysis of Mahāyāna ethics and pedagogy in traditional and contemporary Tibetan Buddhism. FRED TAPPENDEN (Postdoctoral Fellow 2014) is Principal and Dean of St. Stephen’s College in Edmonton, Alberta. He co-edited Language, Cognition, and Biblical Exegesis: Interpreting Minds. Scientific Studies of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2019). JON WAIND (PhD 2016) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University. MEREDITH WARREN (PhD 2014) is Director of the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies and a Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield. She published Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (Society of Biblical Literature, 2019).
ALUMNI NEWS | 33
In Memoriam
Maurice Boutin a Brief Memoir JUNE 10, 1938 – OCT 23, 2019 By Jim Kanaris You could see him walk the streets of Montreal. Stylish blue overcoat, matching peaked cap. His face crinkled, his gaze fixed. Austere. You could be forgiven for thinking him a diplomat, a chargé d’affaires, settling disputes of high importance. Maurice Boutin was no government official. However, he did conduct himself in a way that could make you think he was one. An aura of officialdom surrounded him in his academic dealings. Whether meeting with students in his office, lecturing in teaching spaces, or delivering papers at learned societies, the atmosphere could be thick with ostentation. But you didn’t have to be in his inner circle to see that this was probably generational, a style of almost obsessional love of learning and of the people caught in a similar throe. I recall with amusement the great pleasure he took in citing research of which many were ignorant. If published, whether in casual conversation or in classroom setting, he would always take special care to announce publisher and date. When feeling jocular, he would address his audience with the guilting “As you know,” followed by an interesting tidbit from a recondite work. I witnessed him pull this card successfully even on distinguished colleagues. It was usually done, of course, without incrimination. Maurice simply assumed that one was or should be as well read as he. And if one was not, the simple realization was sufficient reward. Truly a savant extraordinaire, a walking database. 34 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
Maurice taught at the School of Religious Studies since 1991 as McConnell Professor of Philosophical Theology and Philosophy of Religion. He retired nineteen years later, in 2010, and was granted emeritus status soon after. Prior to coming to McGill, he taught at his alma mater, l’Université de Montréal, from 1972. He set off for Munich after receiving his BA (Theology, 1963) to attain a PhD. While at the University, a time in his life he recounted fondly, he became fluent in German. In fact, he wrote and published his Habilitationsschrift in German, a tome of 626 pages on the celebrated New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann (Relationalität als Verstehensprinzip bei Rudolf Bultmann). It was published by the prestigious Chr. Kaiser Verlag in 1974, but is sadly no longer in print. He once communicated what I took to be a melancholic memory of a disappointing brief meeting he had with his aging subject, who must have been 90 at the time; he died only months later. Maurice confided how Bultmann could barely squeeze out an anemic “Ah ja
… Gnade” after hearing Maurice’s involving exposition of the man’s notion of grace. Happier memories include being granted admittance into the huge seminar of the eminent and understandably unavailable Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner as well as being supervised by the distinguished Professor of Dogmatic Theology Michael Schmaus. “Such a nice guy!” (Maurice’s choice epithet when keen on someone) unfailingly followed their mention. Relationalität als Verstehensprinzip bei Rudolf Bultmann would turn out to be Maurice’s only single-authored book. I never asked why, thankfully. The reason was obvious to anyone who worked with him and could look past presumption. Maurice was, as they say, married to his work. He authored numerous articles, reviews, reports, and roneos, numbering in the hundreds. An exhaustive list appears in his Festschrift, Polyphonic Thinking and the Divine (2013), edited by yours truly. The volume is the proceedings of a similarly titled symposium held in Maurice’s honor at McGill in 2010, also organized by yours truly. Just a few years before Maurice’s health became dire, he told me that an edited compilation was in the works. Sadly, and tragically, for reasons which escape me, we never spoke of it again. The curtain slowly closed on a life exiting stage left, one fateful October day in 2019, and on a relationship once unhampered by the foibles of age. A great gift it would certainly be to have seen this project come to fruition. And yet that it has not and probably will not is perfectly fitting in that perfectly uncomfortable sense of the term. L’inouï l’indécidable, a preoccupation of Maurice, is not just an aporia of thought. It is an aporia of life itself! C’est la vie, to apprentice the literal meaning to the tragic expression. Devotion to students also marked the life of Maurice. Graduate students in particular summoned the Barnabas in him. In terms of numbers, I recall asking him in jest what the tally was of his graduate students at the time. “18,” he grinned wryly. No, not 18 in total; 18 active in the queue! He was a master juggler, the success of which depended to a large degree on the indefatigability of students. If Maurice did not have the most graduate students in the country, I would be surprised. He rarely refused projects because specialty, in his opinion, never trumps research. “Research is research!”, he often vented frustrated by colleagues who understandably did not share his view. He supervised sixty-six MA theses and PhD dissertations. Can some departments claim as much? In any event, the numbers speak to time as well, time devoted to the academic formation of students. He would scribble notes or register them on his word processor. For younger readers, google the Xerox Memorywriter! It took a while before he moved to personal computers and the wizardry of online research. Information nuggets were constantly dispatched to students crafted during what to most would be essential times of respite. Maurice’s idea of respite included work. He had a
habit, too, of providing detailed reactions to things one simply asked him to parse, being obsequious about matters of form. A now amusing example is the Festschrift mentioned earlier. After presenting him with a published copy, he returned it a few days later—“as a courtesy”!—filled with editorial remarks and corrections. From typos in running heads and incorrect punctuation to problematic index entries; it’s all there etched in ballpoint! A copyeditor’s dream. A published editor’s nightmare. I keep a copy nearby to inspire a smile—and a wince. All this is true, but admittedly one-sided. Maurice did enjoy a good time! Casual conversation over lunch and a bottle (or two) of wine floods the memory. (I will answer your question. It was not Maurice who instigated the second bottle!) Whether at my house, a mutual acquaintance’s, or Le Jardin de Panos on Duluth Avenue in Montreal, we always shared a good laugh. He was also quite athletic. Reports of his hockey skills as a young man often reached me. He adapted to swimming later. He pushed me aside once when he first visited, knowing I had an inground pool. The niceties of chitchat had to wait. Without hesitation, in a flash, he was in his swimwear minimizing his drag in the water. And what about music? There was the usual penchant for classical music, his favorite composer escapes me. It may have been Chopin; I can’t be sure. In any case, what was unusual and little known was his temperance for disco! He once told me I looked like John Travolta, by which he also meant a form of dance he loved. I do not know if “Saturday night fever” continued to ail him. Whenever would he find the time? Still, the thought that it may have done inspires a personal psychological groundswell. We all have our idiosyncrasies. Maurice’s coalesced into a fascinating portrait. However, because he was such a private man, the pigments are blurry where one wishes they were clear. I have taken care to preserve a memory of it, perhaps not blockbuster worthy but hopefully colorful enough to complement the stilted documentary one may know. He was a phenomenal man, with a remarkable mind. Couple that with his sizeable heart and fragments of a person combine to inspire deep sentiment in those lucky enough to have known him. Adieu, cher Maurice, à Dieu!
IN MEMORIAM | 35
him in some other milieu of the community outside of McGill, as Allan’s love of and for Montreal meant that he was involved with it at many different levels. There was nothing that Allan loved more than a good discussion about workers’ rights at McGill and the community’s need to be more vocal of minority rights of all kinds. But above all it was the students that held Allan’s heart here at Religious Studies. It did not matter what the need was, Allan would always find a way of helping students obtain what they needed for their studies. It might have been inconvenient not having the reading room open on the week-ends, but Allan would work tirelessly making sure that students could take reserve books out over night or for the weekend. As any member of the teaching staff will tell you, he was always on the look out for ways to make our lives easier. When it came to placing various readings on reserve or suggesting different ways of preserving books from the wear and tear of overuse, Allan could be counted on to provide alternatives. Certainly, there was no one on campus who could repair book bindings as well as Allan could and did many a time for various members of staff.
Allan Youster by Patricia G. Kirkpatrick On August 23rd, 2019, Allan Youster, our long time colleague and friend, our go-to person in the Birks reading room, died after a valiant attempt to overcome his cancer. Those of us who knew him, however, will remember him as the man who almost single handedly preserved the architectural integrity of the Birks Reading room against those who saw the space as possible office rooms for an ever increasing Faculty. He was fiercely loyal to McGill on so many fronts. Whether as founder of and first President of MUNACA, or fearless representative on McGill’s Board of Governors, Allan always had the best interests of the students at heart especially when it came to creating safe—and above all, quiet—spaces for them to study and write up their research. But it was never long before those of us who met him at McGill would come to know
36 | RELIGIOUS STUDIES 2020–2021 NEWSLETTER
Allan got around campus but he also got around Montreal and was very much the go to person to find out where the latest gig was happening and what local exhibition one ought not to miss. His understanding of politics at McGill and around the world meant that he was never short of well read and thought through opinions—so much so that I often wished he would write these down. Instead, we would discuss the matter and I learned very quickly that this was Allan’s way of connecting as a member of community. We may not always have agreed, but after a discussion with Allan, you certainly knew you were alive and somehow better off for having taken the time to exchange the ideas he wanted you to know about. Have I said that he cared about students? More than any other person could in unofficial ways, Allan was always ready to listen to students and offer them sane and down to earth advice no matter what their problem. He had a knack of simply making you feel connected again and yes, made sure that you knew that you had a purpose in this world. His humanity when dealing with other people was no doubt trying for some but in the end it was what made the Faculty of Religious Studies and then the School of Religious Studies a place people wanted to come back to especially in terms of the Birks Reading Room. His humanity reminded us that we are all needed no matter who you were. May his spirit live ever on in the Birks Reading Room.
We Value Your Support
Support Us! Gifts from our alumni and friends provide valuable support for scholarships and student aid, research projects, and publications. Your generosity is both essential and truly appreciated. With your help we can continue to offer our students the support they need to succeed in our programs and beyond. Every gift counts!
www.alumni.mcgill.ca/give
William and Henry Birks Building 3520 University Street Montreal, Quebec H3A 2A7 Tel: 514-398-4121 Fax: 514-398-6665