Victoria University is typical of the early development in the 1970s. It
introduced a stage one course on world religions in 1972, a major sequence
of study from 1974, and an Honours course from 1978, dependent on staff
from different departments to help with the teaching load. With two more
lecturers added to cover Indian religious thought, primal religions, and religion
in the Pacific and New Zealand, in 1982 it became a separate department.
With the retirement of Lloyd Geering in 1984 the Chair became vacant and
remained so until taken up by Paul Morris in 1994. Unlike other departments
in New Zealand, however, Victoria University has continued to grow and add
to its staff and areas of expertise, especially in the area of religion and politics,
and religion and contemporary culture. While the University of Otago
established a chair in 1992 with the Africanist Elizabeth Isichei moving from
Victoria University, and seemed poised for development into a larger enterprise,
it appears currently to be losing ground to the neo-orthodox evangelical
theology of the School of Theology and Religious Studies. Departments at other
New Zealand universities still retain only few staff.
The Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Queensland
remains the largest in Australia, with well-established fields of study in
Buddhism, biblical studies and early Christianity, psychology of religion,
philosophy of religion, new religions, and more recently, offerings in Arabic
language and Islamic Studies. The department at the University of Sydney also
flourished, especially from 1992–1993 when the university combined the
department with the postgraduate offerings of the School of Divinity after the
dismantling of the Board of Divinity in 1991.
From their very beginnings, because of their small size, many programs in
religious studies were dependent on staff from other disciplines to assist in
teaching and postgraduate supervision. Thus at La Trobe University in the late
1980s the Division of Religious Studies had four full-time staff members and
two with joint appointments (Paul Rule with History, and Chris Bartley with
Philosophy). At the University of New England, Studies in Religion began as
a section within the Department of Philosophy and relied on staff from that
department in particular to assist in the early years, and later on staff from
history, ancient history, and classics after the discipline moved to form the
School of Classics, History and Religion. Studies in religion would not have
survived as a program in some places without this assistance, and yet it is also
true that such a situation can also be weakening for the discipline area if it is
construed that such assistance is sufficient and there is little need for an
increase in staffing positions within the discipline area itself.
While Trompf and Loeliger introduced Studies in Religion at the University
of Papua New Guinea in the 1970s, the subject area has not continued within
history. The university currently lists a School of Humanities and Social
Sciences with a program in history, gender and religious studies, yet there are
no visible units in religious studies in the curriculum and the named program226
MAJELLA FRANZMANN