Jason Zuidema

Jason Zuidema (PhD, McGill) is Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, and Principal Investigator on a three-year SSHRC-funded research program called "The State of the Consecrated Life in Contemporary Canada."

Bio last updated June 17th, 2021.

Jason Zuidema

Articles by Jason Zuidema

  • Debating Rod Dreher

    Earlier this month, Convivium featured a review by John O’Brien, S.J. of Rod Dreher’s disputatious new book The Benedict Option. Today, readers respond both to O'Brien's piece and the conversation that Dreher has opened within the contemporary faith community. 

    But O’Brien, she says, gets it right when he corrects Dreher’s error in relying on only one saint – Saint Benedict – rather than on the communion of saints that is essential to the faith of all Creedal Christians O'Brien helpfully reminds us that Benedictine monasticism itself had varying relationsh...

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  • Quebec's Rigidly Religious Secular Charter

    The infamous attempt to legislate so-called neutrality is really a religious initiative wrapped in an obscuring veil, argue Jason Zuidema and Harold Ristau

    All of these great leaps forward in the history of isolating "religion" from the public sphere will now be crowned with a Charter for the ages — a Charter that ironically enshrines discrimination against a plurality of religious expression into a document that purports to celebrate pluralism By focu...

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  • Reality Monasticism & Religious Virtuosity

    Jason Zuidema's research on the consecrated life makes him wonder how its possible to teach someone to be a monk

    Though one might contend that the Buddhist traditions of contemplation or monasticism have never needed that kind of theological commitment more akin to Christianity, I am not sure it is entirely unlike the Christian contemplative, monastic traditions Again, the point of contemplation or the monasti...

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  • Mission and the New Evangelization

    Jason Zuidema’s continuing study of Canada’s religious orders

    Finally, if religious were key figures in pre-Vatican II understandings of evangelization, how do they now function? If they were essential to a previous stage in evangelization, that is the "old" evangelization, is there a way in which religious are no longer necessary for evangelization? Is there ...

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  • The Penny Drops

    Crime novelist Louise Penny's The Beautiful Mystery projects pop culture's take on religious life, Jason Zuidema writes.

    Though The Beautiful Mystery is only one of a wide range of stories with the religious life as a backdrop, it is representative of trends in popular culture that present the veneer of veracity rather than more nuanced portraits In an age of blogs, Facebook "friending," and tweets, how is religious l...

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  • Spending to Remember

    The second part of a series on the future of religious communities in Canada looks at what is being done to help future generations remember the communities even as they fade from fallible memory.

    Plantinga's point about narratives can help us understand what is going on as communities of religious plan for their memory to live on and become part of the narrative of a society that might have little or no direct memory of them I have had the pleasure of visiting Edmonton three times in the pas...

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  • The Death of Religious Life in Canada

    What will bring new life to religious communities in Canada? What "deaths" must happen, Jason Zuidema ask, for that new life to arise?

    Further, because of the mixed nature of many of these communities, including ones with married members, it has taken time to figure out how they ought to be understood within the structure of Catholic religious life So even with new communities and immigration, will the religious life die in Canada?...

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