Mode over Matter: Response to Hughes, From Seminary to University

Abstract

The story Aaron Hughes tells in From Seminary to University (2020) is at once archival and timely, not because it presumes to transport the past into the present or mine for prescriptive insights from thinkers long gone but because it “provide[s] a historical work that accounts for ‘how’ as opposed to ‘what’” (13). In presenting a narrative arc for the study of religion in Canada, the book offers a model of how nuanced historiography might attend to contemporary questions (both field-specific and more broadly) without making the past “about” or “for” us. Avoiding the trappings of recovery work as well as retrospective projection, Hughes considers the archive on its own terms while remaining cognizant of the fact that it never speaks for itself. This brief response essay greets the occasion the book provides to think about the structural framework that shapes the “how” of an academic discourse.