Religious Studies in Alberta: A State-of-the-Art Review

Brian Champion was Reference Librarian, Humanities and Social Sciences Library, University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Neufeldt has undertaken a “state of the art” examination of the study of religion in Alberta’s educational system. It is thorough — it considers religious studies at the major post-secondary universities, the community colleges, the private religious colleges, and even secondary schools — but the result of the study seems to be pessimistic:

[w]herever courses in world religions are found in [theological colleges, bible colleges and bible institutes] they betray the same weakness or narrowness as do the courses in the university context. The primary orientation is toward the conceptual, that is, the study of doctrines on belief systems, and represents a particular bias in the understanding of religion, a bias evident in the biblical, theological, and history of Christianity courses as well. Religion is seen as primarily a matter of doctrine and the assent to doctrines or doctrinal systems. This is of course an intellectual bias which is transferred from a particular understanding of what it means to be Christian to an understanding of what it means to be a part of another religious tradition (p.33).

What Neufeldt would like is an orientation to religion that “can be studied through cultural artifacts, literary modes of presentation, oral modes of presentation, patterns of behavior, rituals, myths, etiquette, and history as well as through thought forms and texts” (p.37). In short, he wants to re-do the way religion is studied and make it more holistic, more involved. This is a work that should be acquired by anyone interested in the future of religious studies; whether or not Neufeldt’s proposals come to fruition is secondary to the catalytic and heuristic nature of this book. On a secondary level of importance it is a superb description of the quality of teaching in Alberta and the quality and quantity of research and publication produced in Alberta. It contains an appendix describing the courses of religious studies at Alberta’s four universities, six community and regional colleges, five independent liberal arts colleges, three theological colleges, and eight bible colleges. A comprehensive and useful book; now we need nine others.