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

2021 ◽  
pp. 000842982110416
Author(s):  
Jennifer A Selby
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Convincing Argument ◽  
National Values ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Religion In Canada ◽  
Archival Work

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.

scholarly journals The Study of Religion and the Canadian Social Order

2021 ◽  
pp. 000842982110419
Author(s):  
David Seljak
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Canadian Society ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Canadian Context ◽  
Original Argument ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Religion In Canada

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.

scholarly journals Argentine Concordat as an International Agreement Regulating the Law of Patronage

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-109
Author(s):  
Marta Zuzanna Osuchowska
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
International Agreement ◽  
Holy See ◽  
Bilateral Relations ◽  
Legal Method ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right

In the history of relations between the Argentinean government and the Holy See, two ideas are permanently intertwined: signing the Concordat and defending national patronage. The changes that occurred in the 1960s indicated that exercising the right of patronage, based on the principles outlined in the Constitution, was impossible, and the peaceful establishment of the principles of bilateral relations could only be indicated through an international agreement. The Concordat signed by Argentina in 1966 removed the national patronage, but the changes to the content of the Constitution were introduced only in 1994. The aim of the study is to show the concordat agreement concluded in 1966 by Argentina with the Holy See as an example of an international agreement. The main focus is the presentation of concordat standards for the institution of patronage. Due to the subject and purpose of the study, the work uses methods typical of social sciences in the legal science discipline. The dogmatic-legal method is the basis for consideration of the Concordat as a source of Argentine law, and as an auxiliary method, the historical-legal method was used to show the historical background of the presented issue.

Scientific realism and social science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Keat
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Realist Conception

A central issue in the philosophy of the social sciences is the possibility of naturalism: whether disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, economics and psychology can be ‘scientific’ in broadly the same sense in which this term is applied to physics, chemistry, biology and so on. In the long history of debates about this issue, both naturalists and anti-naturalists have tended to accept a particular view of the natural sciences – the ‘positivist’ conception of science. But the challenges to this previously dominant position in the philosophy of science from around the 1960s made this shared assumption increasingly problematic. It was no longer clear what would be implied by the naturalist requirement that the social sciences should be modelled on the natural sciences. It also became necessary to reconsider the arguments previously employed by anti-naturalists, to see whether these held only on the assumption of a positivist conception of science. If so, a non-positivist naturalism might be defended: a methodological unity of the social and natural sciences based on some alternative to positivism. That this is possible has been argued by scientific realists in the social sciences, drawing on a particular alternative to positivism: the realist conception of science developed in the 1970s by Harré and others.

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

2021 ◽  
pp. 000842982110453
Author(s):  
Géraldine Mossière
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Epistemological Issue ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Religion In Canada

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.

SIM’s Directions: “Back to the Future”

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (7) ◽  
pp. 1418-1425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin M. Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Business Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Service Award ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University

This essay addresses directions for the Social Issues in Management (SIM) Division from the perspective of “Back to the Future.” The author was chair of the SIM Division in 1983 to 1984 and the 1989 recipient of the SIM Division’s Sumner Marcus Distinguished Service Award. The essay reviews the general history of SIM during the 1960s and 1970s in which the University of California, Berkeley, played a key role in organizing conferences. The author explains his approach as an applied empiricist to research concerning SIM. The essentials are power, legitimacy, responsibility, rationality, and values, and understanding how they impact the ongoing day-to-day interactions within, between, and among business organizations, their leadership, and other sectors of society. SIM is a field of diverse inquiry which has been the recipient of perspectives and persons drawn not only from multiple disciplines, particularly from the social sciences, law, and management, but also from the humanities and sciences. SIM is patently multi- and inter-disciplinary.

‘The loss of innocence’ in historical perspective

Antiquity ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 72 (277) ◽  
pp. 694-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce G. Trigger
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Archaeological Theory ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Dual Tasks ◽  
Intrinsic Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Single Discipline ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Control

The dual tasks of this paper are to examine David Clarke’s ideas about the development of archaeology as they relate both to the era when ‘the loss of innocence’ was written and to what has happened since. In his treatment of the history of archaeology offered in that essay, Clarke subscribed to at least two of the key tenets of the behaviourist and utilitarian approaches that dominated the social sciences in the 1960s: neoevolutionism and ecological determinism.Clarke viewed the development of archaeology as following a unilinear sequence of stages from consciousness through self-consciousness to critical self-consciousness. The first stage began with archaeology defining its subject matter and what archaeologists do. As its database and the procedures required for studying it became more elaborate, self-conscious archaeology emerged as a ‘series of divergent and selfreferencing regional schools … with regionally esteemed bodies of archaeological theory and locally preferred forms of description, interpretation and explanation’ (Clarke 1973: 7). At the stage of critical self-consciousness, regionalism was replaced by a conviction that ‘archaeologists hold most of their problems in common and share large areas of general theory within a single discipline’ (1973: 7). Archaeology was now defined by ‘the characteristic forms of its reasoning, the intrinsic nature of its knowledge and information, and its competing theories of concepts and their relationships’ (1973: 7). Clarke looked forward to a fourth (and ultimate?) phase of self-critical self-consciousncss, when the new archaeology would monitor and control its own development.

scholarly journals On Guard: The Discourse of Difference in Trudeau’s Speech on National Unity

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Francis Rweyongeza
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Canadian Identity ◽  
National Values ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
History Of

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s July 1, 2017 speech to commemorate 150 years of Canadian Confederation and its seemingly banal content and delivery ironically beckons for critical attention. Delivered to the Prince of Wales on Parliament Hill and millions via television and Internet, the address capped off the immense cultural spectacle of Canada’s sesquicentennial with tributes to Canadian exceptionalism in battle and in sport. However, behind references to reconciliation and tolerance is a well-documented history of contestation that runs contrary to the international myth of Canadian unity. This essay deconstructs a consonance of perspectives on Indigenous relations, multiculturalism, and citizenship proposed by Prime Minister Trudeau in his Canada 150 address on Parliament Hill that is inconsistent with a defining decade of Canadian resistance. I analyze the speech’s attempts to whitewash Canada’s colonial origins and dispel numerous claims of peaceful coexistence between the nation-state and various minorities, fundamentally challenging perceptions of Canadian identity and national values.

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