From Seminary to University in Quebec: de la théologie aux études religieuses

In his book ‘From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada’, Aaron Hughes offers a comprehensive portrait of the historical construction of the study of religion in Canada. While Hughes explains in-depth the social, political and historical conditions of production of knowledge on religion as an academic domain in provinces of Protestant heritage, his contribution is less thorough regarding the development of this academic field in the province of Quebec. In this article, I depict how the creation of institutions of knowledge in Quebec hinged around the Catholic hegemony that lasted since the inception of the colony, namely among faculties of theologies that framed main historical universities. I also argue that this heritage has shaped the ongoing construction of the study of religion as an epistemological issue between Catholic theologians and religious studies scholars.

Forging New Futures for the Study of Religion in Canada: A Review of Hughes’s From Seminary to University

Aaron W. Hughes’s monograph, From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada, argues that, unlike other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the study of religion in Canada is imbricated with nation-state politics. The creation of Canada’s initial seminaries post-Confederation served to establish Christianity as normative. By the 1960s, these seminaries were largely replaced with departments that aimed to promote national values of multiculturalism and diversity. In her critique, Selby commends the book’s convincing argument and impressive historical archival work, and critiques the book’s limited engagement with the politics of settler colonialism and scholarly contributions in the province of Québec.

The Study of Religion and the Canadian Social Order

In his book From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada, Aaron Hughes provides a unique analysis of how the study of religion developed throughout the history of Canada by examining the evolution of its institutional context, that is, from faith-based seminaries and theological colleges to secular departments of religious studies. He situates these institutional changes in the development of the Canadian social order. In this uniquely Canadian context, the study of religion moved, Hughes notes, “from religious exclusion to secularism, from Christocentrism to multiculturalism, and from theology to secular religious studies.” While this is an important and original argument, Hughes offers only a cursory analysis of the unique developments in francophone Quebec universities (as he readily admits) and ignores the study of religion in other disciplines. Moreover, while Hughes traces the motivation for the transformation of the study of religion in the 1960s to the new ethno-religious diversity of Canada, I argue that it should be traced to a growing liberal cosmopolitanism that had infiltrated Canadian society, including its churches, seminaries, and theological colleges. Hughes does not adequately explore the religious roots of why Canadian Christians decided to secularize the study of religion. Finally, while Hughes examines patriarchy and colonialism in his analysis of the study of religion in earlier periods, he drops these topics in his discussion of the secularization of the study of religion, which did not address either of these issues sufficiently.

Mode over Matter: Response to Hughes, From Seminary to University

The story Aaron Hughes tells in From Seminary to University (2020) is at once archival and timely, not because it presumes to transport the past into the present or mine for prescriptive insights from thinkers long gone but because it “provide[s] a historical work that accounts for ‘how’ as opposed to ‘what’” (13). In presenting a narrative arc for the study of religion in Canada, the book offers a model of how nuanced historiography might attend to contemporary questions (both field-specific and more broadly) without making the past “about” or “for” us. Avoiding the trappings of recovery work as well as retrospective projection, Hughes considers the archive on its own terms while remaining cognizant of the fact that it never speaks for itself. This brief response essay greets the occasion the book provides to think about the structural framework that shapes the “how” of an academic discourse.

Defamiliarizing National Histories through Cross-National Reflections in the Study of Religion

As part of the review symposium of From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2020) by Aaron W. Hughes, this review essay compares and contrasts the narrative it tells us to other national contexts and explores what might be the Canadian peculiarities not necessarily obvious to those who have been educated in that system.

He shoots, he misses again, but what about our goalie…: A response

This article provides a response to the previous set of papers that have engaged my From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2020).