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Religious illiteracy in Canada In the confusion following the World Trade Towers disaster, one thing became clear. Many Canadian journalists knew almost nothing about Islam, including the fact that it's divided into several distinct branches. That led to some very misleading news coverage, says David Seljak, a professor of Religious Studies at St. Jerome's. The reporters weren't alone. Seljak finds that most students in his first-year Religions of the East course are dismissive--and deeply ignorant--when asked to describe their idea of what religion is. Why such ignorance? One reason emerged when Seljak began a research project on religion and education at the University of Victoria's Centre for the Study of Religion and Society last year. Discovering that nobody knew exactly what is being taught about world religions in Canadian public schools today, he launched his own survey, entitled Who Teaches What? World Religions in Canadian Classrooms. ("World religions" is academic shorthand for a list that usually includes Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, the religions of East Asia, aboriginal religions, and sometimes also Sikhism and Zoroastrianism.) Seljak found that most students in publicly funded non-sectarian high schools across Canada learn nothing about world religions. A few individual schools might offer an optional course, or, more rarely, a board will mandate a course. In Ontario, an optional ministry-approved course reaches one student in 10. Only Quebec has province-wide mandatory religious education, including some teaching on world religions. The suppression of religious studies in schools has created what Lois Sweet, author of God in the Classroom, calls a generation of "religious illiterates," unfit to live in a society where their next-door neighbours could belong to a different ethnic or religious group as likely as not. The implications for Canada are worrisome, Seljak says. We will need to be very clever at finding ways to live together, and such solutions can only be based on knowledge of each other's fundamental values, beliefs, and practices. "These are issues that every country in the world will be facing in a few years," he notes. "They will come to us to see how we did it in Canada. How we manage this question of teaching world religions will be critical to our success or failure." The survey results will be submitted as an article to a leading Canadian journal of education and will be integrated into a chapter in a book Seljak is co-editing with Paul Bramadat--Religion and Ethnicity in Canada (Pearson, 2004). His goal is to push the public debate, which is fuelled by memories of the uniformly Christian public school system of the 1950s, by the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which many people incorrectly believe bans any mention of religion in public schools), and by the concerns of religious minorities. "The chore will be to convince the architects of the public system that the push to teach world religions is not a way of trying to sneak Christianity, or any religious commitment, in through the back door," Seljak says. "It's a form of multicultural education, and it has the same goals fostering the values of tolerance in a pluralistic society." Most students in publicly funded non-sectarian high schools across Canada learn nothing about world religions. of Cities research project, co-edited by Kieran Bonner, Sociology, and Will Straw, a communications professor at McGill University, is being launched by McGill-Queens University Press. The first book, The Imaginative Structure of the City, by project director Alan Blum, came out in May 2003. Future volumes will include a Toronto/Montreal comparison, a book on circulation of artifacts, and a book on citizenship and political theory to be edited by Bonner and Greg Nielsen. • Bernice Friesen's story, "The Irish Book of Beasts," is among 10 chosen for Best Canadian Stories 2002 (Oberon Press). It was first published in The New Quarterly (Vol. XX, No. 4), which is published out of St. Jerome's. "The story," says TNQ editor Kim Jernigan, "actually an excerpt from a novel, tells of the new boy at an Irish Catholic school and his fall from grace, or at least from the boughs of one of the forbidden trees in the head priest's orchard, and the subsequent search for an appropriate punishment." • In spring 2003 Maureen Drysdale, Psychology, and James Downey, past president of the University of Waterloo and director of the Waterloo Centre for the Advancement of Co-operative Education (WatCACE), began a research study on the connection between academic learning and the co-op work term. • Carol Acton, English, presented papers at two conferences this spring: "There Are No Men Here: Demythologising the warrior in women's war writing,"at the Conference on War and Conflict held at the University of New Hampshire in April; and "Masses of Memoried Flowers: Combatant mourning and the subverted pastoral," at the Association for the Study of Literature and the