Willard Gurdon Oxtoby (July 29, 1933 – March 6, 2003) was an American theologian who studied and taught comparative religion, and was the founding director of the Graduate Centre for Religious Studies at the University of Toronto.[1][2]

Early life

Oxtoby was born on July 29, 1933, in Kentfield, California[1][2] into a family of scholars. Both his father and grandfather were ministers and teachers of the Old Testament,[1] and both were deans of San Francisco Theological Seminary, in San Anselmo, CA. He graduated in 1950 from Tamalpais High School, Mill Valley, California.

Education

After graduating with a degree in philosophy from Stanford University (1955), Oxtoby completed masters (1961) and doctoral degrees (1962) at Princeton University,[1] specializing in pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions. From 1958–1960 he worked in Jerusalem as part of the team that studied the Dead Sea Scrolls.[1][2]

Career

Oxtoby's first teaching job was at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec (1960–64),[1] where he launched the university's inaugural course on Judaism. After a few years, he realized he needed to explore the influences on the religion of the Hebrews following their Babylonian exile, so he undertook two years of post-doctoral work at Harvard University (1964–66)[1] to study Zoroastrianism, an ancient faith born in Persia, and possibly the world's first monotheistic religion.

Oxtoby taught at Yale University from 1966–1971,[1] before accepting a full professorship at the University of Toronto's Trinity College, where he taught for 28 years (1971–99).[1] There he founded the Graduate Centre for Religious Studies in 1976, which he directed (1976–81).[1] Driven by his interest in comparative religion, Oxtoby travelled to more than a hundred countries and studied more than a dozen languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Ugaritic and Sanskrit.

In terms of publications, Oxtoby was probably best known for the two-volume introductory textbook he edited, called World Religions: Western Traditions and World Religions: Eastern Traditions, published by Oxford University Press (1996; 2nd edn 2002).[1]

Personal life

Oxtoby married Layla Jurji in 1958 (1935–1980), with whom he had a son and a daughter.[1] A year after her death from cancer, he married Julia Ching (1934–2001), who also died from the disease.[1][3]

Oxtoby died of colon cancer in Toronto on March 6, 2003.[1][2]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Hussain, A. (2003). Professor Willard Gurdon Oxtoby (1933–2003). Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 32 (1–2): 177–81. doi:10.1177/000842980303200112
  2. 1 2 3 4 Willard Oxtoby *62, Princeton Alumni Weekly (accessed 27 October 2022)
  3. ↑ Willard G. Oxtoby (2001). Julia Ching, 1934–2001. Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (4): 745–46 JSTOR 3654337
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