Students will see a new face on campus this fall, as Professor Sean McGrath joins the School of Religious Studies as Visiting Professor for the 2019-2020 academic year. McGrath is trained in both Philosophy and Theology, having graduated from the University of Toronto with an MA in Philosophy in 1996, an MA in Systematic Theology in 1999, and a PhD in Philosophy in 2002. In 2017, he defended his second dissertation, in Theology, at the Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, for which he received a PhD in Systematic Theology. He is also known as an active environmental philosopher, for his examination of the theological origins of the ecological crisis in several of his articles.
McGrath lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland, with his wife and son, where he is a Full Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University and a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. A self-described environmentalist, although with a more conservative than leftist leaning, McGrath and his family spend their summers in an off-grid cabin they built on a hill overlooking Conception Bay North. He is also the founder of a Non-Profit Organization in Newfoundland called For a New Earth , which galvanizes local political will around ecological issues in the province.
He is the author of many books, including The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge), and the recently published Thinking Nature: An Essay in Negative Ecology. McGrath also serves as the co-chair of the North American Schelling Society (which he founded with Jason Wirth in 2011) and the editor of two academic journals: Kabiri: The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society, and Analecta Hermeneutica: The Official Journal of the International Institute for Hermeneutics.
What attracted you to McGill and the School of Religious Studies?
It was through my collaboration on various projects with Dr. Garth Green, the current Director of the School of Religious Studies, that I came to know more about McGill’s exceptional program in religion. I am impressed that where many other programs of religious studies have become one-sidedly social scientific in their approach, even hostile to theology and religiously-based research, McGill’s School of Religious Studies is truly pluralistic. Alongside excellent social scientific research, theology and more committed forms of religious research thrive at McGill, and this strikes me as an important difference from many other programs.
What are your current academic interests?
My current academic interests are largely the ones that I started with: Christian philosophy of religion and its relationship to various modern trends. I spent five years in a contemplative Catholic religious order after my BA. My appreciation for the philosophical significance of mystical Christianity and for medieval thought in particular, started then, and has not really waned. Through my study of modern theologians such as Schleiermacher and Barth at the Toronto School of Theology, I became interested in Protestantism, its inevitability, and its importance to every aspect of modernity, from psychology to economy.
You have written books on philosophy, religion, and psychoanalysis. How do you see your work overlap across these traditions and the periods which you focus on?
While my output appears eclectic, there is in fact a common theme. In each of my four books, I have traced a modern discourse back to secularised Christian concepts. Heideggerian existentialism, psychoanalysis, the attitudes at the centre of ecological crisis—all have their roots in medieval Christendom and the Protestant Reformation. In each of my books I have tried to show that Christianity is far from over; rather, it is changing form, as it has many times before.
Which are now the principal areas of your research?
I am working on arguments for the self-secularization of Christianity, which are found throughout 19th century and 20th century German and French thought, and more recently, in figures such as Zizek, Gauchet, and Agamben. Secularism, it seems to me, is not without religious roots, and these roots dig deep into basic Christian concepts. I am interested especially in the relevance of these arguments to contemporary social and political problems, such as climate change, inter-religious dialogue, futurism and post-humanism.
What will you be doing while on campus?
I will spend May and June finishing The Late Schelling and the End of Christianity, which is under contract with Edinburgh University Press. I am looking forward to participating in the Jacobi Symposium hosted by the Department of Philosophy and the School of Religious Studies in September. In January 2020 I will be teaching RELG 270 Religious Ethics and the Environment. I am planning on approaching this course in a comparative vein. With the active involvement of the students as co-researchers I want to examine what precisely the world’s religions can contribute to producing a more ecologically just society. With many others, I am convinced that we need to transition from ethnic-religious isolation to planetary consciousness if we are to make the changes to our habits of consumption and production necessary for future generations of humans and non-humans. I don’t think we can do this without religion. Every religious tradition needs to find in its own texts, rites, doctrines and practices, its unique way towards the one future, which we will all share. And while all of this is going on, I am eagerly anticipating participating in the supervision of the many excellent graduate students who work with Dr. Garth Green and Dr. George di Giovanni.
What excites you about Montreal?
My mother is a Montrealer, and my sister and her kids, with whom I have always been close, live here. I guess they are not kids anymore--one graduated from McGill last year, and the other two are McGill seniors. I grew up visiting Montreal at Christmas and Easter, and spent many summers in the Laurentians. I love this city, its culture, and its international vibe. I am very much looking forward to getting to know researchers, scientists, activists, and intellectuals in the Montreal area. I think that the future of academic research, at least climate conscious research, has to be local: less jet setting and more local, or at least, regional networking. I am no doubt as guilty as any of getting to know distant parts of the planet far better than my regional scene. I am looking forward to changing that.
How do you see your academic work contributing to your respective fields, academia, and the world at large?
I am a bit of an academic method actor. I immersed myself into psychoanalysis while writing The Dark Ground of Spirit and trained for a time as a psychoanalyst. The work that led to Thinking Nature put me in conversation with natural scientists and political ecologists for years, and compelled me into environmental activism on a fairly intense scale. While this immersive style of research has certainly profited my work, I would also like to think it profited, if not the world at large, at least certain parts of it.
What is one goal you hope to achieve during your time here?
I hope to return to philosophical theology. I have been working in various other areas in the past decade. But questions in these other areas always led me back to theological questions, especially the question concerning the secular legacy of Christianity. I am especially interested in the relationship of Pauline universalism to the old theme of the natural or rational knowledge of the divine. Is there a perennial philosophy of religion which undergirds the major world’s religions? Can it be expressed in public or logical terms? McGill, with its strong traditions in comparative religion, philosophical theology, and philosophy of religion, is an ideal place to do this work. I’m very excited about the year to come!