Blending the spiritual with the secular

By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express

Randy Boyagoda knows his way around the written word. The author has seen his work published in publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Walrus and the Financial Times. His work has garnered him a nomination for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the country’s top prize for literary fiction. He has also held positions at universities such as Notre Dame University, Ryerson University and, as of July 1, as the principal and vice-president of the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College.

But in all that time, there was a group he says never reached out – the media from his own hometown.

“I’ve been a professional writer for the last 10 years. I write for the New York Times, I’ve been reviewed in the New York Times, I’m on CBC all the time, and this is the first time any Oshawa media has ever asked me about my work,” Boyagoda says with a laugh.

“The New York Times will call to ask me about my work, but nobody ever called me from Oshawa.”

St. Michael’s College, founded in 1852, has maintained its strong Catholic ties throughout its history, and that is something Boyagoda says he wants to continue.

“We live in an age, where I think, religion is a profoundly important category of the human experience that is full of debate and division and confusion. It’s easy to just kind of ignore all of it,” he says.

“We also live in an age where people think that if you believe in God, this means you can’t be very smart. So what’s great about a Catholic intellectual community like St. Michael’s College, at the heart of one of the world’s great global research universities, it’s where students will be invited and indeed challenged to demonstrate how, in fact, you can find relationships between faith and reason that are productive.”

This new position will be a sort of homecoming for Boyagoda, who had classes at the college while working towards his English degree from the University of Toronto. Now in the position to help influence another generation of students, Boyagoda says he hopes they can continue to live and learn in the Catholic tradition, as opposed to feeling compelled to separate the spiritual from the secular.

“Back then, as a Catholic kid coming out of Oshawa, I didn’t really think there was much that the life of faith and the life of mine had to do with each other. They weren’t really connected to each other. I think I missed out on a lot of personal, intellectual growth because I didn’t pursue those connections until later in my personal and academic life,” he says.

“I would really encourage students, from the beginning, to look at how those things can inform each other and how they can learn from them and demonstrate the goods of that model of faith and reason together.”