David Goa, director of The Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life, seeks to give peace a chance in an ever more turbulent world

In March of this year David Goa stepped into a job for which he has seemingly been preparing all his life. Goa, who is now director of the newly opened Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public life at the U of A’s Augustana Campus, is a natural born philosopher and teacher who spent over 30 years of his life as a U of A religious studies professor. He also developed a program of cultural studies at the Royal Alberta Museum. In that latter capacity he paid particular attention to the conversations of Alberta immigrants, to their stories and the religious and cultural context in which they built their lives in the province.

Today, when he walks the streets of his hometown of Camrose, Alberta, he can almost hear in the layers of the wind the voices of the thousands of ‘others’ who left their pasts behind in the hulls of rusty boats from Asia, the barren breadbaskets of Europe, the minefields of Serbia and Sudan, and the spent casings of mortar shells on the streets of the Middle East, to come here and begin again. Also omnipresent are the voices of his own parents, Solveig and Finn, Norwegian immigrants lured here by the promise of a new land and a new beginning.

To ask Goa where he comes from is to be told about a place defined less by landscape than by conversation; it is the passionate discourse, loaded with religious and political overtones that took place at his parents’ kitchen table morning and night, that is the landscape of definition for Goa.

“I grew up surrounded by conversation,” remarks Goa. “In my parents’ home there were only two things you could talk about: religion and politics.”

The Bible was central to these conversations and young David was encouraged to study it. “It was a household in which the scriptures were very lively,” he says. “The stories of Joseph, Sarah, Abraham, Rebecca and Isaac were common fare. I knew these women and men as well as my neighbours. I’ve often felt that I grew up like a Jew without a synagogue. My parents had a love for the church but were always rather critical of its dysfunction.

“I also always had a sense that if you weren’t interested in talking about religion and politics — and therefore faith and life, church and state — that you were wasting time. My father was a humorous man, but with him one always had the sense that life was short and there were interesting things in life and one ought to be devoted to understanding them.”

The passionate conversations of friends and neighbours around the Goa table that went on through the night and into early morning fascinated the young Goa. Talk revolved around important issues of his parents’ generation — a generation that had survived the Depression, two world wars, and that was challenged by the rapid shift to a capitalist-driven politic. “People think of Alberta as a conservative place,” continues Goa, “but Camrose, like most of the Prairies, was a radical place. It was born of radical politics.”

As a young man, Goa left Alberta to study religion, history, and philosophy in Chicago and has since been involved in various research and documentation projects in Canada and abroad. The author of numerous books and scholarly articles, he has a particular interest in the intersection between religious tradition and modern culture.

Goa’s new job represents a sort of coming full circle. Goa not only knew Chester Ronning — the Canadian diplomat, politician and educator who was born in China to Norwegian Lutheran missionaries — but remembers Ronning bouncing him on his knee when he was a baby.

“My parents and Chester Ronning were the only two Lutheran socialists in Camrose,” Goa recently told the Edmonton Journal.

Goa’s parents were influenced by Pietism, an evangelistic Lutheran religious movement that helped shape the socialist modernization of Norway. “It seems counterintuitive here, but in Europe, socialism rose out of religious movements.” As Goa describes it, his parents, who lived a faith anchored in sincerity, simplicity and that embraced a dialogical engagement with religion and politics, learned English in the radical political atmosphere of Tommy Douglas (Saskatchewan premier and New Democratic Party founder) and William Aberhart (first Social Credit premier of Alberta).

Goa says he learned to listen from his mother and to talk from his father. “I used to feign sickness, so I could stay home and sit on the kitchen counter and listen to my mother’s conversations with our neighbours.” He describes his mother as a natural born psychologist, who was always able to talk to her coffee klatch regardless of who among them wasn’t talking to another.

He was also raised to believe that life was to be lived with intention and with devotion, and within a lively text where faith and life were not separate entities. All of this prepared him for when he was asked to develop the program of cultural studies at the provincial museum. “It happened almost by accident, but it was an opportunity that I was quite prepared to seize.”

“Having grown up in a world of text and conversation it was natural for me to go into communities to seek out devout people, people who had been shaped by their living tradition, people who had an active cultural memory. It was natural for me to want to talk to people who cared about their historical experience and to enter into conversation with them about how they understood, about who they were, where they were. Isn’t that the great Canadian question? Where is here?”

Goa intuitively understood that to understand involves opening up one’s own world up to another and quotes Martin Buber: “ ‘The dialogical moment is not a moment where periphery meets periphery. It’s a moment where centre meets centre.’

“So much of our study of anthropology and religion has a pretext of objectification, a pretext to neutrality. I didn’t believe that. The best conversations come out of commitment on both sides. So for me the ‘other’ was never somebody to be afraid of. They were always somebody whose face invited me to a great mystery.”

Goa’s teaching, his scholarship, and his engagement with the popular press are all part of his vocation to engage in an active public dialogue whose lofty aim is to increase our understanding and to add depth to what he sees as an increasingly glib society. And his years of talking with ‘the other’—the Doukhobors, Sikhs, Hindis, Muslims and Jews—have had a profound effect on Goa.

“It is the traumas of this last century that have spewed out so many from Europe, from Asia, and from Africa. What we have in Alberta — one of the most pluralistic places in the world, as it has been from the beginning of settlement — are communities of people who have either the memory or who are the children of those who are the bearers of the memory, of much of the trauma of the 20th century.”

And what we have in the Chester Ronning Centre is a sort of think tank at the U of A’s Augustana Campus that seeks to honour those memories while bringing together people from divergent disciplines and religious backgrounds to discuss the ways in which morality and spirituality can and should intersect with good governance and public policy.

“You can’t do much of this work without realizing that the ideological perspectives that people have always touch on reality and are never enough. You may speak with someone from the other side of whatever that terror of history is and they also will be right and it will never be enough. The strongest impression is a sense of how awful the 20th century has been for so many and then how amazing it is that so many people in this part of the world have been able to live new lives again. That these people can walk upright is utterly amazing and Alberta is full of them.”

Goa defines Alberta in part as a land that holds vast unexpressed grief “that our writers, and our poets and our universities have not yet paid attention to. I have tried to do that.”

Taking the helm of the Chester Ronning Centre has brought Goa back to the streets of Camrose where the conversations that shaped his vocation sound in his memory. In his parents’ promised land Goa will continue to engage interested people in dialogue about important issues. He will meet them with his intellect, and with commitment. He will meet them in his Centre or theirs. He will meet them with passion and devotion. He will pay attention.

—Zanne Cameron, ’99 BA

Visit the website for The Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life.