p. 15 “Prairie Poem: for George Grant”. George Grant (1918-1988), worked in Adult Education, then after study abroad he became a university teacher, latterly at Dalhousie. He wrote Philosophy in the Mass Age, Lament for a Nation, Technology and Justice, etc. etc.
We became friends in Toronto, when George came to recuperate from TB, after duties during the London Blitz. His courage in wartime England as a pacifist was impressive. Later, when studies and teaching took him to other cities, his articles and books kept me in touch. Two writers central to me, Dostoyevsky and Jacques Ellul, cropped up in George’s writings. We met again in his York University-McMaster period, when his rambunctious but principled consistency delighted me. George worked under a sky that kept opening out.
p. 30 “Notes from Dr. Carson’s Exposition of I John 5”. Donald A. Carson is a Canadian theologian, presently Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. This poem refers to a sermon he gave in Toronto.
p. 67 “To Wilfred Cantwell Smith”. Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-1999), was introduced to Canadian readers in 1962 by the published CBC series The Faith of Other Men. His last two books, in 1998, are Patterns of Faith around the World and Faith and Belief. Reference works call him an “Islamicist” – see his On Understanding Islam, 1984. He taught at McGill, Dalhousie, and, for the last years, as Professor of Comparative Religion at Harvard.
In failing health, he and his wife moved to the seniors’ residence where I live. The in-house paper delegated me to interview him simply as a new resident. The Smiths’ friendly, unassuming welcome made it easy, although I was awed to learn that Wilfred spoke Urdu, Arabic, and many European languages, and his wife (a surgeon who practiced in India before Partition) spoke Punjabi and some oriental languages as well. Until their health forced a move to nursing care, I had the joy of reading aloud (his sight was increasingly poor) many an afternoon, with breaks for conversation. The epigraph records one comment he made in passing!