Willard G. Oxtoby

Willard G. Oxtoby (1933-2003) studied and taught comparative religion, and was the founding director of the graduate Centre for Religious Studies at the University of Toronto.

Early life

Oxtoby was born on July 29, 1933, in Kentfield, California into a family of scholars. Both his father and grandfather were ministers and teachers of the Old Testament, and both were deans of San Francisco Theological Seminary, in San Anselmo, CA. He graduated in 1950 from Tamalpais High School, Mill Valley, California at the top of his class where he was elected Treasurer of the Student Body and was Manager of both the Football and Basketball Varsity teams. He also was editor of the weekly Tam News.

Education

After graduating with a degree in Philosophy from Stanford University, Oxtoby completed masters and doctoral degrees within a year of each other at Princeton University, specializing in pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions. From 1958-1960 he worked in Jerusalem as part of the team that studied the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Career

Oxtoby's first teaching job was at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, 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 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, before accepting a full professorship at the University of Toronto's Trinity College, where he taught for 28 years. Driven by his interest in comparative religion, Oxtoby travelled to more than 100 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.

Personal life

Oxtoby was married to Layla Jurji (1935-1980) and, after her death from cancer, to Julia Ching (1934-2001), who also died from the disease. Oxtoby himself died of cancer on March 6, 2003.