Patrick Stange graduated from the DSR in 2022 and is now based in Nova Scotia. Born and raised in Southern California, he completed his bachelor’s degree at UC Santa Cruz and came to the University of Toronto to attend graduate school at the Department for the Study of Religion. We sat down with Patrick to talk about his road from (and to!) the DSR, his experiences in the study of religion, and how they are threaded through his professional activities.
What brought you to the DSR?
I studied classics in my undergrad. So, I really loved Latin and Greek literature, the Roman Empire and antiquities in general. I had a course on the New Testament – much of it, and versions of the Hebrew Bible, are written in Greek. My interest spurred me to continue in graduate school and I was really attracted to John Kloppenborg’s research on the synoptic problem and on Greco-Roman associations.
Tell us about your PhD topic, “Partakers in Paideia: Representations of literacy in the epigraphy of Christians in Central Asia Minor.”
I was interested in how Christians in that area, after about 250 CE, would use lofty Homeric language on their gravestones to project a higher status or a political aspiration – making Christian allusions through the language of Homer. I argued that Christians latched onto this language to move up through the governmental apparatus in the Roman Empire. These gravestones were just mixed in, in regular cemeteries, indicating no hiding of a Christian identity – so some of the claims of persecution may be a little overstated.
Having a PhD in religion does make you a lightning rod for people wanting to talk or ask you questions about religion.
Do you think your perceptions have been shaped by your study of religion?
The main answer is that whenever I see any aspect of religion in the news or hear about religious conflict, I always revert back to the concept that these are really just vehicles of culture.
Having a PhD in religion does make you a lightning rod for people wanting to talk or ask you questions about religion. Some people assume that it was a kind of maybe training for the priesthood or something like that and they're not wrong in thinking that way. Certainly, I shared classrooms with theology students in my course work although of course we saw things differently.
We've definitely become a more secular society for the better in a lot of ways, I would argue. But you do lose a little bit of that community aspect and I feel that behind people being curious about religion is them trying to find some way to fill the social aspect that it had for them.
I'm not a practicing Catholic by any means, but you know, I love going to church with my grandmother at Christmas because that's like a family, a community kind of thing. People still want and are curious about the things that come with practising a religion.
Naturally, a lot of people been asking me about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and to me, that's much more of a historical political issue to unpack.
Can you explain your current role and how it relates to your studies – if indeed it does.
I work for Lux Research, in a department called predictive anthropology. All my colleagues have PhDs in social sciences, like anthropology, or classics or humanities of some stripe. We bring our skills and knowledge to bear in market research, forming a business think tank to help companies understand the cultural problems that face innovation, new products, new services.
What is a typical example of the kind of thing you might be called upon to examine?
Say we’re called upon to provide information about electric cars: what are some fears, values, motivations and attitudes people have about them. We use algorithms that scrape linguistic data from the internet around conversations about electric cars that might reveal that people are scared to be stranded, or think the vehicles don't work, and so on. We can see what, say, the top one hundred relevant topics are, and the sort of language people are using. We create a kind of word cloud, and I will interpret it and write a report.
We’re assessing cultural values and backgrounds of topics, and performing emotional and psychological motivation studies. We work with companies who, for example, are trying to refashion their materials and manufacturing processes to be more sustainable and pollute less, looking at carbon capture technology, that kind of thing.
The high analytical and writing standards of a PhD, the academic rigour, makes the transition to the business world straightforward as the level you bring exceeds expectations.
You're utilizing the skills gained from the PhD, but not necessarily the meat of what you were studying?
Yes and no! As it happens, right now I’m working on a project for a Lutheran investment company that wanted an overview of American Christianity, its values and culture. In a previous project, the client wanted a philosophical/theological look at altruism – what is a Catholic perspective? What is a philosophy of religion perspective? The toolbox from my background had all the stuff on individuality from Hagel and on empathy so it does come up. Also, I studied German for a long time and I do research in German language markets as well.
The high analytical and writing standards of a PhD, the academic rigour, makes the transition to the business world straightforward as the level you bring exceeds expectations.
You could say, then, that you have gone from specialist to more general, yet you couldn’t do the general with having been the specialist?
And I have learned about all kinds of things through the work. All of us have different backgrounds and experience but every person I work with also has the same kind of training, having come through a humanities or social science PhD. It’s a pretty unique work environment and very enjoyable.
If someone asked you if they should study religion, what would you say?
Certainly, when I was going into it a lot of people were like, well, what are you going to do with that? I would say to go for it, but I also think it depends.
I would say go for it because I think any type of specialized training is valued in the world. I would also say that you have to be willing to go through that entire process and understand that you're not necessarily going to get an academic job at the end. I was originally really committed to that route but about halfway through I started to see the writing on the wall. Even diligent and well-qualified people weren’t getting a callback and I was like, I don’t think this is going to work.
So, I spent probably two years before I defended learning about what other options were out there. I was definitely positioning myself to do something else. I would also remind students, too, that having a PhD is an impressive achievement. When you work with everyone who has a PhD or is working on getting one, you kind of forget that.
The end of the PhD is a bit raggedy.
Can you think of any memorable advice you received during your time at U of T?
It was from, one of my advisors, John Marshall, when he said the end of the PhD is “a bit raggedy.” PhD students have a tendency to get wound up and are so immersed in the process that they end up hanging their whole identity on it. He encouraged me to accept that the end is unsure and to take it as it comes. Just get it done and see what happens. That was really helpful advice for me. Accept a bit of chaos at the end!
In general, John really reminded me to remain a human in general throughout my studies. That is sound advice, too: PhD studies can turn you into something of a recluse if you’re not careful.
How are you enjoying life in Nova Scotia?
As someone who loves antiquities, I’m also lucky that where I live is a very historical area. I do volunteer work with local history groups and just helped write some interpretive plaques for a cemetery – very handy that my PhD involved working on stone inscriptions! I’m fortunate I still get to engage in a lot of history. That's what brought me to my studies in the first place, my love of history – I love helping people understand it or interpret it in the present.