Q: Like many of us, you've received your training in both Canada (at Queen's) and the United States (at the University of Chicago). What's been the impact of this on you as a scholar? Any comments on the strengths -- and weaknesses -- of the training you received?
A: Well, leaving Ontario to go to Chicago in 1968 was significant for me. The biggest impact was to raise my consciousness about Canadian topics and interests. Because everybody around me in the Religion and Literature field at Chicago seemed to be working on American topics, I--perversely--choose either British or (when possible) Canadian ones. The training (I prefer "education" actually) was first-rate, with stimulating surroundings, brilliant professors, and a strong community of graduate students. Today I'd probably study something (I'm not sure what) other than Religion and Literature, but what I did then suited me, and has worn well in more than 25 years of teaching. Graduate work at Chicago gave me a strong basis to build on, and I'm fortunate I went there.

Q:Building off that first question, you're Canadian, but your work has had an international focus and scope. Has this been intentional on your part, or is it a natural extension of your training?
A:Good question: discovering how little Americans knew about Canada might have helped me guard against becoming narrowly focussed or parochial. But they often knew how little they knew and wanted to learn more. In that way the international focus was a natural extension of my grad school experience. The experience of being in Japan for extended periods three times in the 1990s has been very enriching for my wife and me. This was intentional internationalization on our part. Probably in the future greater numbers of students will be born in one country, educated (in part at least) in another, and work in a third.

Q: You've published fairly eclectically. I'm particularly interested on your work on the canoe trip as a sort of religious journey or exercise, and your article, "Canoeing and Gender Roles"? How did that come about?
A: I'd done my Ph.D. thesis on the Christian epic hero, and noticed that canoe trips seem to be like the epic journeys I'd been studying. My writing on canoe trips was the application of a religious pattern (Joseph Campbell's monomyth) to an aspect of contemporary leisure culture. These essays were also an integration of my academic and personal life, and an attempt to work out the religious meaning of the secular.

Q: How long are you in Japan for, right now? What are you doing there? Is this part of the video you've been working on, on Japanese pilgrimages?
A: I'm in Japan for the third time this decade, for a six-month stint as a Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Kwansei Gakuin University, with which Queen's has an affiliation. So, I'm teaching and researching Canada-related topics, but also engaging in importing as well as exporting knowledge--that is, I've been importing knowledge about religion in Japan back to Canada, as well as exporting knowledge about Canada to Japan. The way I look at the Canadian religious scene has changed a lot as a result. I've been learning about Japanese religion since my first trip here in 1992, when I began taking videos focussed on pilgrimage, ritual, and shrines and temples. After my second trip I began to teach a course at Queen's in Religions of Japan. And now--this is the Japanese equivalent of "coals to Newcastle"--I'm presently teaching Japanese Religion--in Japan--to exchange students from France, the United States, Hong Kong, Canada, and Bulgaria.

Q: Advice for younger scholars?
A: Advice? You mean something like the Desiderata, or Kurt Vonnegut's graduation address (I think he said you should never put anything in your ear smaller than your elbow)? Maybe something along the lines of Joseph Campbell's "Follow your bliss?" Was it Will Rogers who said, "Never play cards with a man named Doc; never eat at a restaurant called Mom's; and never go to bed with someone whose problems exceed your own"? How can I improve on that, or the sign-off for the Dead Dog Cafe? How about something along these lines: 1) Stop buying books when two-thirds of those currently on your shelf remain unread. Use the library. 2) Don't kid yourself: In ten years the topic of your Ph.D. thesis will interest no one, not even you. 3) Above all, be wary of advice. You are a new generation of scholars, with perhaps unprecedented pressures on you, and (I hope) new opportunities available to you. Stay curious and alert to chances; find ways to take your scholarly work to a larger audience. And that's about enough of that.

Q: Any other projects in the works?
A: I'm following up my "Dimorphs and Cobblers" article recently published in Studies in Religion. I'm exploring further how people mix and match religions in western settings; also how implicit and explicit religion combine; and, how a religion is modified by its practice among members of a diaspora. I've got several essays on the go dealing with the religious aspects of Canadian fiction in the 1990s. And, I want to continue filming Japanese religious life and sacred sites, perhaps with the end in view of producing further videos.

Q: I'm sure this question has dogged you for years, but I have to ask...you have such a famous name for a scholar of religion; any sense that your name dictated your destiny, so to speak?
A: My "destiny"? You can't be serious! Well, in that spirit, let me say that it's a destiny I've rigorously tried to avoid, like Oedipus, or the character in the story Viktor Frankl tells about "Death in Teheran." I have never read The Varieties of Religious Experience. I (fortunately for other reasons too) decided to go to Chicago rather than Harvard.

...on being William James:

" I have never read The Varieties of Religious Experience....if my name has decreed my destiny I have, like many tragic heroes, tried to flee from it rather than embrace it."