Dr. Randi Warne chairs the Department of Religious Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Q: Tell us a bit about your research.
A: I'm delighted to say that two projects have just reached completion, a special edition of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion on Gender and the Study of Religion, for which I was guest editor, and a co-edited book (for which I co-wrote the introduction) entitled Telling Tales: Essays in Western Women's History. The latter is being published by UBC Press this spring, and is a collected volume of essays on western Canadian women's history.
My current research project is in the area of religion and culture in Canada. Tentatively entitled "Canada's 'Brave New World'? Race, Eugenics, and Social Reform in Alberta", I am investigating the support for eugenics legislation in Alberta, primarily in the 1920s and 30s. Here I am building on my prior work on Canadian social reformer and Christian feminist activist, Nellie L. McClung.

Q: Your work is truly interdisciplinary. Are there particular challenges to treading these waters?
A: Indeed! Let me give you a bit of background. As you can see from the answer to your first question, I work in at least two different areas in religious studies, namely, method and theory, and religious history. My background casts the net even further: I did an undergraduate degree in religion and literature, my master's degree was in philosopy of religion, and my doctoral work was in the area of religion and culture. My questions (many of them about gender construction) kept taking me in new directions, and I was fortunate to be able to pursue them. Eventually all this stuff went into my doctoral dissertation (and later book) on the Canadian feminist, Christian author and social activist, Nellie L. McClung, and I really did need all those skills to do her justice.

The thing with interdisciplinary work, if I may be candid, is that it makes some people suspicious. The expectation seems to be, if a scholar draws from many different approaches s/he can't really be expected to do any of them very well. Breadth is thought to come at the expense of depth, and I suppose at a certain level that is true. I never want to read Hegel again, for example, though I am glad I did it while in grad school. But it is not the case, in my view, that complex cultural constructions like religion, or gender, can only be understood adequately from a single methodological perspective. Quite the opposite is the case, I would think. The study of religion, at some level at least, seems to *require* interdisciplinarity. In your initial framing of this question, you asked about Religious Studies and Women's Studies, and if there were any special challenges to that connection. In a word, yes!

When I first started out doing some of this work in the early 80s, I really felt caught between a rock and a hard place. Religious Studies was gender-blind, virtually unremitting in its androcentrism, and Women's Studies (in Canada at least) was anti-religion in pretty much all its forms. Now we're seeing some interest in religion in the form of "spirituality" or "goddess" religion in Women's Studies circles, but for a long time there, the climate was extremely chilly for a feminist scholar of religion.

It was a truly bizarre experience. On the one hand, Religious Studies folks seemed to think I was some kind of barely acceptable radical because I was actively using feminist theory in my scholarship, while Womens' Studies folks assumed that because I studied Christianity I had to be some kind of Bible-thumping evangelist. I learned a lot about the social construction of identity through this!

Q: So now you're a tv celebrity?! What are you doing with that?
A: Mount St. Vincent University is one of three Canadian universities which has courses running on the Canadian Learning Channel. My Women, Religion and Social Change course and my Women in Christian Tradition course have and are being (re)broadcast on CLT. It's a blast! The courses originally went live to air, and now the taped versions are being shown across the country. I must admit, I really love it, not the least reason being I get to say things to a national audience that I used to get slammed for when I was a student. Sex, religion and politics - what could be better? On a more serious note, there is strong evidence that the show is reaching a lot of people. The distance education office has received numerous calls and letters, and I have myself. One of the most moving was a letter I received from a 72 year old woman saying that she had been raised a "Bible Christian" and taught to believe, as a woman, she bore all the responsibility for sin in the world. "Now that I've watched your show" (which was Women in Christian Tradition) she said, "I've learned how they came to think that way, and I don't have to think that way anymore." That is, by learning more about the historical context of the development of Christian doctrine, she was able to get some critical distance on what she had been taught.
There's no better experience teaching than having students learn something like that. And I must admit, I really find the stuff I teach exciting to talk about, so it is deeply gratifying that others seem to find it interesting too. Dislodging androcentrism, a little bit at a time...

I've also done a fair bit of radio work, and I do dramatic monologues in the character of Nellie McClung (in fact, I'm going to be doing a performance at the University of Windsor on March 9, 2000, and have travelled across Canada and the States doing performances as well.) There's lots of talk these days about academics needing to "make research relevant to the public," on one side, and "being a public intellectual" on the other. My "shows" on women and religion may be entertaining, but they also contain powerful critiques of the status quo. I hope the people watching will not only (for example) be intrigued by discussions of, say, the Oneida community's commitment to plural marriage, they will also start to ask some questions about socially approved arrangements in their own world. I have found that the most outrageous contemporary issues can be handled effectively when placed in an historical context (indeed, I find that playing McClung - I can say the most radical things, and it all gets accepted, because, supposedly, she's a dead old lady. If I said the same things as myself, the roof would come down!) I guess the point here is that education is a multi-faceted project. Different media can help achieve traditional educational ends, and then some.