Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The essays in this volume deal with the relationship between living religious traditions in Canada and the fabric of Canadian society. Canada is a pluralistic society, ethnically and religiously. How are these two pluralisms related? Their connection is intimate, but never simple. For many years there could plausibly have been said to be a dominant Anglo-Canadian Protestant tradition, with other faiths and denominations being associated primarily with ethnic minorities. No doubt this would always have been a simplistic understanding, but today, as Canadian culture is increasing secularized, it is religion itself that the majority sees as a minority concern. Ethnic and religious loyalties pull together against a secular assimilation. Such a change leaves the “establishment” denominations with an unwanted identity crisis of their own, not the least part of which is due to an unfamiliar awareness of their own ethnic roots and histories.
Harold Coward is a professor of history and director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria.
|Leslie S. Kawamura is an Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, Alberta. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, in Far Eastern Studies (1974). He has studied at the Kyoto University (Japan) and has taught at the Nyingma Institute (Berkeley), Institute of Buddhist Studies (Berkeley), and the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon). His publications include Mind in Buddhist Psychology (with H.V. Guenther, Dharma Press, 1975) and Golden Zephyr (Dharma Press, 1975). He was a founding member of the Honpa Buddhist Church of Alberta and the Canada-Mongolia Society.