Religious Studies

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Religious Studies.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Browsing Religious Studies by Author "Wilson, Jeff"

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    How it Seams: Religious Dress, Multiculturalism, and Identity Performance in Canadian Society, 1910-2017
    (University of Waterloo, 2018-05-16) Morlock, Laura; Wilson, Jeff
    Canadians generally consider themselves forerunners of acceptance who deem diversity a core value, yet this identity coexists alongside fierce national debates over reasonable accommodation of minority religious practices in public spaces. In this context religious minorities use dress to communicate their needs and goals to the larger society, in the process expanding the parameters of human rights for all Canadians. This challenges the false narrative that Canada is a religiously neutral nation without its mainstream society’s own fervently held beliefs and practices, and of religious minorities as an inherently threatening force to these inviolable values. In order to understand how religious minorities engage dress in highly symbolic ways, this dissertation explores the ways everyday clothes become objects of sacred performance and sites of fierce public contestation in the process of identity creation, maintenance, and re-creation. This study uses three case studies of minorities and religious headcoverings in Canada over the course of a century to understand how dress functions as a means of communication within and between religious minority communities and the larger Canadian society. The first is the debate over Swiss Mennonite women’s headcoverings in Ontario during and immediately after World War I. The second is Baltej Singh Dhillon’s experiences as Canada’s first turban-wearing Sikh RCMP officer in 1989-90. The third is Zunera Ishaq’s Supreme Court case to wear her Muslim niqab during a citizenship ceremony and its effects on the federal election of 2015. These case studies provide examples of potential outcomes for these groups. In the first, the group achieves its ultimate goal but the larger society largely misses its message. In the second, Dhillon achieves his goal while successfully communicating his message to the government. In the third, Ishaq achieves her goal, but the larger society does not fully understand her message and the matter remains hotly debated. This dissertation considers the discursive interactions of clothes, colonialism, human rights, and religion, bringing together a diverse collection of theories and methods from several disciplines, demonstrating that those who “cling” to these parochial ways are far from incompatible with Canadian ideals.
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    Renunciation and the Householder/Renouncer Relation in the New Kadampa Tradition
    (University of Waterloo, 2019-04-30) Emory-Moore, Christopher; Wilson, Jeff
    Founded by the Tibetan-British monk Geshe Kelsang Gyatso in 1991, the New Kadampa Tradition – International Kadampa Buddhist Union (NKT-IKBU) is a fast-growing and controversial transnational Buddhist network that has enthusiastically embraced an expansionist business model and major monastic reform. Toward an improved understanding of the group and of Tibetan Buddhism’s diasporic modernization more broadly, this dissertation examines the practice of Buddhism’s traditionally monastic soteriology of renunciation (the abandonment of “worldly concerns” on the path to liberation from cyclic rebirth) by members of urban NKT meditation centres in Canada and the United States. When China declared its sovereignty over the Tibetan cultural region in 1951, twenty-year old Kelsang Gyatso was one of over 6,000 monks residing at the Geluk monastery of Sera near Lhasa. Forty years later when he founded the NKT in northern England, Gyatso decided it would have no monasteries, only congregational teaching and meditation centers designed to spread his interpretation of Geluk Buddhism. Without monasteries to institutionally support the Buddhist praxis of renunciation, what does renunciation look like in the NKT? My ethnographic study of the North American NKT addresses this question by engaging field interviews, participant observations, publications, teachings, and media through a conceptual apparatus prominent in both Buddhism and Buddhist Studies: the householder/renouncer relation. I argue that the NKT’s market-driven expansionism not only supersedes its funding of a monastic community but replaces monasticism as the principal institutional framework for renunciation in the form of full-time subsistence missionary work on the part of ordained and lay Kadampa Buddhist virtuosos. Whereas Tibetan clerical renunciation looks like the monastic community’s dual abandonment of the household activities of economic and sexual production, my analysis of NKT labour reveals that these have been bifurcated between ordained Kadampa monastics who renounce sexual reproduction but not economic production, and Kadampa missionary managers who renounce the latter but not necessarily the former. Celibate monastic ordination becomes an optional lifestyle, the suitability of which is primarily a matter of personal preference rather than ritual specialization, and the arduous and austere life of a missionary (lay or ordained) becomes the principal model of a consecrated life of renunciation. Finally, I suggest that this hybrid business model of “missionary monasticism” has been a major factor in the NKT’s external growth, producing a diverse and motivated labour force whose renunciation of economic remuneration provides the organization with the fruits of their economic production, but also in some of the movement’s more visible internal fault lines: labour shortage, turnover, and disgruntled former members.
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    Thirsty Land into Springs of Water: Negotiating a Place in Canada as Latter-day Saints, 1887-1947
    (University of Waterloo, 2018-05-17) Brassard, Brooke Kathleen; Wilson, Jeff
    This dissertation examines how Latter-day Saints—originally an American tradition—expanded into an international religion beginning with their settlement on Canadian soil. The “Americanization thesis” promoted by scholars such as sociologist Armand L. Mauss, geographer Ethan R. Yorgason, and historian Thomas G. Alexander, who argued that Latter-day Saints assimilated into the American mainstream society by the mid-20th century, might lead one to expect to find a linear progression of “Canadianization” and a clear distinction between American and Canadian Latter-day Saints (LDS) by the 1950s. However, my investigation of Latter-day Saints in Alberta and their material culture, politics, economics, gendered roles, and marriage practices reveals that there was no singular element that differentiated American from Canadian Latter-day Saints. Understanding the subtle nature of the Mormon experience in southern Alberta (rather than America) required attention to Canadian society and Canadian narratives, and how Canadian LDS negotiated their identities in these Canadian contexts as a type of integration. The key to offering a critical analysis of negotiation, especially with a case study featuring Latter-day Saints, was to focus on the tension between integration and “peculiarity.” Mainstream society forced the newcomers to decide what they were willing to give up, maintain, or innovate in their own tradition as well as what they would adopt, reject, or ignore in their adopted society. Certain beliefs, traditions, and practices unique to Mormonism—characteristics that drew borders around themselves and maintained an identity of peculiarity—provided enough tension between the LDS and outsiders to keep them separate and different; however, this was generally in an inoffensive way because the Mormons successfully represented themselves as valuable settlers and labourers who posed little threat to the status quo in Canadian society.