Quest University Canada

Paul Burns

Paul Burns comes to Quest University Canada with many years of experience teaching courses at the University of British Columbia in World Religions, Religion and Literature, History of Christian Thought, and Classical Greek and Latin Literature. For several years, he taught and then directed a team-taught program, which was an integrated "Introduction to the Humanities". In 1994 he was awarded the University Teaching Prize.

Paul has an M.A. and Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Toronto. He also has graduate degrees in Theology from the University of St. Michael's College, and in Early Christian Thought from Oxford University.

In his teaching Paul seeks to promote an appreciation for the variety of traditions and to explore differences in these religions across cultural and historical boundaries. Each time he has taught the course on World Religions, he has been impressed at the range of student interest in religious cultures. He is particularly interested in the tensions between religion and modern culture which has its origins in relations between Christianity and Western political and scientific cultures. Paul has enjoyed the opportunity to explore the roots of some of these issues in our courses on "Identity and Perspective," "Global Perspectives," and "Religion and Modern Culture".

Paul's teaching is, in part, informed by his research interests. In 2007 he edited a collection of essays on the figure of Jesus in twentieth-century Literature, Art, and Film. Three of the most interesting articles in this collection were written from Jewish or Muslim perspectives. He currently has a book in press, due out in 2012, which studies a fourth-century discussion of the principles and stages of the Christian life. A little later in the fourth century and throughout the Middle Ages, Christian Lives will be dominated by monks and ascetics. Hilary of Poitiers, the author of this particular text, comes from a very different background. He has been educated in the Roman schools and makes selective but positive use of the historical, literary, philosophical and even scientific resources in Latin culture. Paul finds that there are certain affinities between Hilary's comprehensive interests in the culture of his time and the breadth of the curriculum we follow at Quest.

From these experiences he seeks to incorporate into his teaching the wisdom of the traditional saying: "Tell me and I will forget; Show me and I will remember; Involve me and I will understand".

For weekend activities, Paul and his wife are avid hikers in the coastal mountains of British Columbia. In the winter they ski but in this sport, Paul does admit that his wife is more proficient.

To contact Paul, you can email him at or call him at 604.898.8000 or our toll free number in North America 1.888.QUEST.08 (1.888.783.7808).

Quick Links

2011 Course Catalog