This book came to live in my house sometime around 2003. I teach part time at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada and had found myself facing unemployment. My PhD dissertation was in the history of religion, but focussing on Canada, and even more narrowly on Anglicans in Hamilton, Ontario. I won’t go into the reasons for this narrow focus other than being narrow is a necessity at the doctoral level in this day and age.
Most Ontario universities have their origin in church colleges. Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario began as a Presbyterian college; the University of Toronto was Church of England; McMaster Baptist; Windsor, Catholic. Guelph was unusual as its origins were in two colleges: agriculture and veterinary medicine. The modern university was formed on these twin foundations in the 1960s by government fiat. Back in those rosy days, the provincial government had bags of money to throw at education. They do have bags of money these days, but owe far more than is found in these bags or entering provincial coffers as revenue. Back then, it was gravy. So, the University of Guelph came into being in the small Ontario city of Guelph.
The church founded colleges had each taken their 30 pieces of silver to become large, wealthy secular universities, but had retained a church college or seminary as part of their mix. Thus, for example, Baptists still come to McMaster University in Hamilton to train for the ministry and there is a Baptist chapel in the centre of campus. But Guelph? Guelph has barns and barn smells wafting over the hurrying students who study biology or history.
I played academic entrepreneur therefore. I looked at the subjects on offer at Guelph and found only a minor scattering of religion studies. A history course on the Reformation; a course on the theory of religion offered in Sociology and Anthropology, made me think …. hmmmmm….. what about a World Religions’ course? I knew very little about any religion other than Christianity and only had a detailed knowledge of Anglicanism within that broad topic. But, one thing a research degree teaches you is to research anything and to have acquired the arrogance to think one can master anything.
The first step was to google around to find a good one volume World Religions book that took an historical, rather than theological perspective to give me some air of expertise. I am, after all, an historian of societies and of people who compose those societies, not a theologian or an intellectual product of a Religious Studies department. The book I found you can see above.
Ninian Smart was one of the first, if not the first, scholar to begin the study of World Religions in the academic world. I bought the book online, as a printed copy (this was before the Era of eBooks) and in the second edition, published in 1998. Smart was the pioneer in the field of secular religious studies; that is, the study of religion divorced from Christian theology. This book was my authority in preparing a proposal to the Chair of the History department at Guelph, then Jamie Snell, to adopt a course in World Religions. With the help of Dave Farrell, a former Chair, the proposal passed the appropriate university committees and with a stipend, I set to work writing World Religions in Historical Perspective as a fully online course. I used Ninian Smart’s masterwork as my primary source. The course was offered first in 2004 in the Winter term and again in the Summer term. For some years I earned a nice income twice a year, but in recent years it is offered only in the Summer.
Now there are clouds on my horizon as I sense university politcs looking to end this course. My online teaching ratings have dropped from ‘Outstanding’ to merely ‘Satisfactory’ despite no change in quality or revisions or looking at new ways to reach students online. I see university politics at work. Unlike big business where once I worked, universities do not speak truth to the powerless. In business, if you are redundant, they tell that to your face and help you make arrangements to leave with some dignity. In the academic world if you are contingent faculty, they sneak around before ridding one of a troublesome lecturer, by the simple expedient of cancelling the course without telling the lecturer. One day, you look at the list of offerings for the term and find your course missing. I will know next March whether this course dies or not. Oh, and it won’t be because of a lack of student interest as it still attracts roughly 200 each Summer.
Bookstory 