Chinese and Indian religions, African religion, and the indigenous religions of
Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.
One major development, especially at the time of the centenary celebrations
in Australia in 1988, was a concern to define more clearly the national identity
of the country, including the religious aspect of that identity. Ian Gillman’s
book, Many Faiths One Nation(1988), was one response to this concern, and
was partly funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority. Of interest to many
readers of that book was the emergence of new statistics concerning the growth
of non-traditional religions or of Eastern religions such as Buddhism, currently
the fastest growing religion in Australia. In New Zealand, too, there was much
interest in the religions of the country. While many of the works were written
by historians and sociologists, staff in Studies in Religion also published
important contributions, such as Christopher Nichol and James Veitch’s (1980)
edition of Religion in New Zealand, and Peter Donovan’s (1985) directory of
Beliefs and Practices in New Zealand.
Of particular interest to New Zealand (although it also exercised sociologists
of religion in Australia) was the issue of secularization. While the large surveys
of New Zealanders’ values and beliefs in 1985 and 1989 were carried out by
other discipline areas (notably Alan Webster [Education] and Paul Perry
[Sociology]), conferences and seminars with scholars from Religious Studies
were held on the subject, one of the most significant being the final seminar
in the series ‘The Future of Religion in New Zealand’ held at Victoria Univer-
sity in 1976, entitled Secularisation of Religion in New Zealand, and intro-
duced by Lloyd Geering. A few years later, the 1983 International Religious
Studies conference in New Zealand used the theme ‘Religious Dimensions of
Secularization’.Key thinkers and textsThe issue of the identity of departments of studies in religion led logically
enough to a concern to define the critical methods of the discipline. In Australia
the discussion on method and theory in the study of religion, and the history
of religions especially within Western European intellectual history, was taken
up by Eric Sharpe, Philip Almond and Garry Trompf. In particular, Almond’s
work (1988, 1989) on Western interpretations and inventions of Buddhism
and Islam is noteworthy.
Within the interest in secularization, Lloyd Geering’s place is significant.
Even without the ‘notoriety’ of his heresy trial before the Presbyterian Assembly
in 1967 (Veitch 1983), he would be the most significant scholar in the history
of religious studies in New Zealand. His publications focus on the role and
challenge for Christianity in a secular and technological world, and his
multitude of smaller popular works (with St Andrew’s Trust Publications)—
on topics as various as human destiny, evil, Jesus, New Zealand’s future, science224
MAJELLA FRANZMANN