Brian A. Butcher arrives at McGill after three years of teaching in the Toronto School of Theology, where he remains a Fellow of the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptysky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies. From 2011-2017, he taught courses at Saint Paul University in Ottawa in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions. As Adjunct Professor of Catholic Studies, Dr. Butcher will bring to the School of Religious Studies expertise in Eastern (-Rite) Catholicism and comparative liturgy; his research interests include sacred music, patristics, philosophical hermeneutics and interreligious dialogue.
He will be offering CATH 325: Mystery and Imagination in the Fall 2021 term and CATH 220: Rite Makes Might in the Winter 2022 term.
CATH 325: Mystery and Imagination; What is beauty? Why does it matter so? How does it relate to the experience of God and the Church’s interpretation of revelation? What role do the arts play in traditional and contemporary encounters and expressions of faith? This course engages such perennial questions (and more) through a survey of the sources, themes and media characteristic of Eastern Christian, i.e., Orthodox and Eastern (-Rite) Catholic, aesthetic theory and practice, drawing also upon pertinent Western dialogue partners.
CATH 220: Rite Makes Might: An Introduction to Orthodox/Eastern(-Rite) Catholic Liturgy and Spirituality; This course examines fundamental elements of worship and piety as expressed in the five extant liturgical traditions in use among the Eastern Christian Churches: Alexandrian (Coptic and Ethiopian/Eritrean), Armenian, Byzantine, East Syriac and West Syriac (including the Maronite).
In 2018, Fordham University Press published his Liturgical Theology After Schmemann: An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur. Other recent publications include ten entries in the forthcoming 4th ed. of The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2021) and chapters in Liturgies: Philosophical Explorations of Embodied Religious Practice (OUP, forthcoming in 2021) and Orthodox Christianity and Gender: Dynamics of Tradition, Culture and Lived Practice (Routledge, 2019). Brian’s professional associations include membership in the American Academy of Religion—where he serves on the steering committee for the Eastern Orthodox Studies Unit—as well as the Society of Oriental Liturgy, the International Society for Orthodox Church Music, and the North American Academy of Liturgy. A subdeacon in the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, he also conducts the Sheptytsky Institute Choir (based at St. John the Baptist Shrine, Ottawa); in addition, he plays the organ and directs the Coram Deo schola at St. George’s Roman Catholic Church (Ottawa).
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Butcher to the School of Religious Studies; we are grateful to host his research and teaching!