Hardly a week goes by that I don’t look south with envy at all the research being done in the U.S. about the role religion plays in politics, culture and society at large in that country.
Want to know about attendance at religious services? Whether non-religious Americans think conservative Christians exert too much political power? How many evangelicals actually attend church? It’s all available.
As someone who writes about religion, I love that kind of information. But much of it doesn’t translate into the Canadian context. I have often wished there were groups like that in Canada working to make sense of the religious landscape in this country.
That’s why I was happy to learn about the new Institute for Religion, Culture and Societal Futures (IRCSF), a new hub for empirical research related to religion, spirituality and emerging forms of communities of belief and practice in Canada.
The Institute will specialize in four main areas of research: religious trends in Canada, the interaction between religion, spirituality and culture, religion and spirituality in schools and the realities and the future of Catholic life in Canada.
Read about it in my recent column in the Free Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment