Brian Carwana (PhD, 2021) studied “Evangelicals, the Liberal State, and Canada’s Family Values Debates,” arriving at the DSR via venture capitalism and a chance meeting that completely changed his career direction. He is the Executive Director of Encounter World Religions, where he develops programs that promote religious literacy and inform a whole variety of audiences about ethno-religious diversity in our complex everyday world.
How did you get interested in studying religion?
My path was quite unusual. I had a business degree and I was working in finance and venture capital and I realized I just didn’t like it. I had attended a 12-week series of public talks on religion that really piqued my curiosity, and subsequently ran into a guy in Guelph called JW Windland who had founded what he described as a world religions centre – the idea being to foster positive encounters between people of different faiths. He was brilliant and a great teacher, who would bring people into houses of worship. He'd walk into Hindu temples and everyone knew him, the same thing with Wiccans and Rastafarians. I thought, this guy's astonishing, and I started helping him on the side while I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I’d been doing courses at various places, studying history, thinking I might become a high school history teacher. This job, though, captivated me.
Eventually a US professor on one of our courses asked me why I wasn’t doing grad school and the seed was planted. With no background in religion, I had to do courses and then a master’s in religion and culture at Laurier, and ultimately to the DSR for my PhD.
Completely changing direction is a big deal as an adult. Was that difficult?
The funny thing to me now is that I actually finished a business degree and thought that was my calling! But, really, I was a fish out of water and went on to find the place where I fit. I've been very fortunate.
How did you choose a particular area to specialize in, with such a wide interest?
When I went to Laurier, I thought I would be an Islamicist, but came to understand the lack of exposure to it was problematic in several ways. Much of my early interactions with the study of Islam was the study of secularism, and I began to think, how do you investigate similar questions here in Canada? I started looking at Canada's evangelicals and their political activities, and that grew into the PhD.
I thought I was studying religion and then over time I realized I was actually studying people.
Do you consider that your studies have influenced your perspective on cultural, social and ethical issues?
Very much so. You’re asking questions about what is socially constructed and what is more than that. Initially, I thought I was studying religion and then over time I realized I was actually studying people. Questions like who are we? How do we function, make decisions? The West’s language of individual autonomy governs a lot of our cultural, social and ethical issues. I increasingly started to think that this individual autonomy is very overstated, that we are actually very interdependent and context dependent.
Once you finished your PhD, what then?
It took me a long time to finish. I was working more or less full-time, raising a family and trying to write my dissertation. It was a nightmare, to be honest! By the time I finished, my predecessor at Encounter, JW Windland, had retired and then unfortunately died. So I was basically already running the centre when I finished the PhD.
What is Encounter World Religions all about?
It’s a charitable organization that promotes religious literacy. It is valuable for society that people be literate about diverse religious, secular and spiritual identities. We work in three areas: with the public, schools and the workplace. I frequently run programs for the public, sometimes coordinating with visits to houses of worship to witness ritual, for example. Secondly, schools ask for teaching sessions or to organize visits, Lastly, for workplace consulting, we’ve worked with police, government and healthcare – all sorts. For example, I’ve been speaking with a tech firm about how to create an inclusive work environment that doesn’t silence that aspect of employee identity.
Providing an educational opportunity to enter these spaces is crucial to building understanding.
How is the content typically delivered?
It could be a talk over Zoom. Or an interview format, where I might talk with individuals from a tradition – for example, we have sessions for the workplace on demystifying Islam or Judaism, say. Other times we go to various locations. The ultimate for Encounter is to combine classes with visits. Our big program in the summer is Discovery Week: we cover eleven religions in one week, with introductory classes and multiple site visits.
Providing an educational opportunity to enter these spaces is crucial to building understanding. A lot of these buildings – mosques, temples, churches – are black boxes to people, and we can get apprehensive about black boxes. A lot of people approach our centre for that reason. They’re curious and interested, but they don't know how to go in or whether they can, they don’t know the protocol.
You must have formed diverse relationships all around the city.
I have. For example, I have a great understanding with several mosques in Toronto – in fact, one of the imams has become a good friend. There are a couple of Hindu temples where they let me take people around myself because I've been coming for so long. It's been a wonderful benefit, meeting people in a whole range of communities.
Even if I didn't have a career related [my PhD], I had learned things about myself, about others, about the world, about Canadian society, that I was always going to value having learned.
What would you advise students who are considering studying religion?
As far as a PhD goes, I’d say do you have to do it?. It's hard, it’s demanding and it will take up time, money and energy. But I got so much out of it – there are some people who are just, like, I have to do this.
After the 2008 market meltdown, the academic job situation for religion grads had really worsened. Students like my cohort had entered with one set of expectations and were now dealing with a dramatic change. I remember asking a friend from my year how she was coping with this and she said something that really struck me: “I have become interesting to myself.” I really liked that because when I was doing venture capital, I was not interesting to myself. I was doing stuff that meant nothing to me. I realized at that moment even if I didn't have a career related to it, I had learned things about myself, about others, about the world, about Canadian society, that I was always going to value having learned. Of course, it is really fulfilling to study so deeply, but there are certainly challenges and compromises you have to make. If you have to do it, then do it but there are easier paths.
What would your ideal religion course be?
One would be a world religions class. A lot of religion grads find that class a bit frustrating because it’s very general, and there are all these questions and critiques around the category of religion – but I think that's precisely what makes it so fascinating!
There's that saying that the purpose of an education is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange: to have that feeling in a classroom is a singular experience.
When I was U of T I taught a course that looked at sex and politics in the context of the North American evangelical movement. I loved that one, as it provided the opportunity to investigate modern society and modern liberal democracies and how they work. We're asking the questions about who are we, but also how should we be like, how should we work as a society? And questioning things like public and private freedom, compulsion, emotions, secular and religious thinking. It is a wonderful way to look at how society is organized and to consider what its flaws are. It would be even more relevant to living in Canada today than it was ten years ago, I think.
What is appealing about a course like this is that it gets us beyond choosing a position. The great thing about humanities study at its best is that moment of suspending judgment and simply trying to be curious about something. Although I studied Canada's evangelicals, I don’t share a lot of their commitments on political and social issues, but I was surprised how much they taught me about the flaws of secular, liberal ways of thinking. There's that saying that the purpose of an education is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange: to have that feeling in a classroom is a singular experience.