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Copyright@ Australian Catholic University 1998-2026 | ABN 15 050 192 660 CRICOS registered provider: 00004G | PRV12008
Copyright@ Australian Catholic University 1998-2026 | ABN 15 050 192 660 CRICOS registered provider: 00004G | PRV12008
On a dark November evening in Montreal, where the temperature often drops below zero and the wind chill makes it feel even colder, Professor Garth Green sits in his home office, contemplating the warmer days ahead. Within weeks he would relocate to Melbourne – a city where January means summer, not the cold Canadian winter that he and his Italian wife have become accustomed to.
But his move to Australia isn’t for the weather. It’s to take up a role that represents something far more profound: the fulfillment of a promise made to a man who fundamentally shaped his intellectual trajectory.
Professor Green is the inaugural director of ACU’s Ray L. Hart Centre for Philosophy of Religion, an institution made possible through a pledged philanthropic bequest from its namesake, Professor Emeritus Ray Hart, whose influence on religious studies in North America is virtually without parallel.
Years ago, when a younger Green arrived at Boston University for his postgraduate studies, Professor Hart was one of nine philosophers of religion on the faculty. He went on to become Garth’s doctoral advisor and mentor.
“As a student, I was blessed by a series of exceptionally close relations with some exemplary figures – none more important to me than Ray Hart,” says Professor Green, whose mentor, over a 60-year academic career, founded more than a dozen religious studies departments, received countless honours and awards, and served as president and journal editor at the American Academy of Religion. “I believe that this move will secure what I think of as a sacrosanct legacy.”
He admits, however, that he’s excited by the prospect of not only a new university, but also a new continent and a new city.
“I’m grateful for a new challenge, horizon, and learning experience, culturally as well as intellectually.”
Garth Green comes to ACU from McGill University, where he was the John W. McConnell Professor of Philosophy of Religion and director of the School of Religious Studies. Although he has enjoyed a fruitful career as a philosopher of religion, he recalls that as an undergraduate, he “had to be encouraged by exemplary teachers”.
Professor Garth Green is the inaugural director of ACU's Ray L. Hart Centre for Philosophy of Religion.
One such teacher was Claude d’Estree, who had hosted the Dalai Lama at Harvard University the year before Green studied with him. Professor d’Estree introduced him to Tibetan Buddhism and arranged for what would become a life-changing experience: a research stay at Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, where he lived and studied with Tenzin Choegyal, the Dalai Lama’s brother, and immersed himself in Buddhist philosophy and practice.
The experience was transformative. It led to a research position at the Smithsonian and eventually a Master of Arts in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy at Boston University. Yet something unexpected happened during that degree.
“It was toward the end of that first MA that I began to realise I was less committed to the answers Buddhists gave to certain fundamental questions than I was interested in the questions themselves,” he says.
He began exploring these same questions, surrounding themes like subjectivity and self-consciousness, through a different prism.
“I realised that the themes and questions that led me to pursue Buddhism as a religious tradition were equally at home in traditions I had not studied, but that I’d grown up in. This provided a bridge for me to take my interest to the histories of European philosophy and Christian theology, which I’ve studied ever since.”
One thing that has emerged from this scholarly journey is a fascination with binaries: sacred and secular, reason and revelation, medieval and modern, philosophy and theology, knowledge and faith.
For Professor Green, these aren’t merely academic concepts, but lived tensions that mean different things in different eras.
So how do these binaries play out in the current era?
“Without the ‘and’, and in every case, I believe and lament that they have hardened,” he says. “For many, they present an either/or question that forces a decision for or against.”
He’s concerned that many people live with what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls “lacerated” and “buffered” lives, unable to integrate various dimensions of the human experience. Take someone who separates their scientific worldview from their spiritual convictions, as if the two could never speak.
“I worry that the denotation of the sacred, or the mutual implications of knowledge and faith, of reason and revelation, or even a clear comprehension of what these have meant, has been lost,” says Professor Green, who worked alongside Charles Taylor at McGill University.
“For me, it’s the special task of philosophy of religion as a subfield to bring out their proper character, their mutual implication.”
Another theme in Professor Green’s work is inheritance: how philosophical and theological traditions are passed on, and how they shape who we understand ourselves to be. In his second master’s thesis, he explored Hegel’s account of self-consciousness, and from that work emerged what has become a long-held preoccupation.
“For me, reading Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Kant and Hegel, is not an exercise in pure history,” he says. “It’s an exercise in self-understanding.”
Once again, this is more than an abstract academic concept. It’s a claim about how we become who we are, how the past lives in the present, and how inherited traditions continue to inform the ways we live and think. When we use terms like ‘faith’, ‘reason’ and ‘hope’, we are inheriting centuries of contestation and transformation.
“We inherit the history of theological and philosophical views of what theology and philosophy are, and how they relate,” Professor Green says. “There’s a kind of cumulative effect to that, but also a contesting character to those different accounts.”
Consider how concepts that originated in theology – freedom and human dignity, for example – have been adopted in secular philosophy and politics, their theological roots largely forgotten. This is one of the reasons why philosophy of religion is important, Professor Green says. It recalls the theological origins of many key concepts in modern and secular philosophy.
“This can do really good work, I think, in reminding us of the territory on which our culture has set foot.”
So, what will the Ray L. Hart Centre for Philosophy of Religion do? And how will Professor Green, as its inaugural director, shape its vision?
“I first would stress the term ‘inaugural’,” he says.
“The centre will have a life and career of its own after me. That itself is exciting, to work on something that will remain and have its own life, and I have every confidence ACU is committed to this for the long term.”
While there are similar research centres in the United States, at universities like Notre Dame and Princeton, Professor Green says the specific character of ACU – with its clear identity and mission, extant faculty strengths in and around the field, its campus in Rome, and partnerships with established research institutions across Europe – will guide the direction of the Ray L. Hart Centre, affording it a distinctive presence in the field.
Any such centre can be expected to examine historical and current accounts of the character of religious beliefs and practices through a philosophical lens: the nature of religion and rituality, the existence of God, the relation between faith and reason, and the limits of religious experience.
“But a centre should also and intentionally nurture a community of scholars,” Professor Green says. “That community includes ACU faculty members in the field, but it also includes our international partners – present and future – and our students.”
He adds that Ray Hart was “always keenly aware of the unfinished character of each generation’s work, the way that it bears fruit, if at all, in the work of the next generation”.
“I’m one of over 100 doctoral students he supervised across his long career. For this reason, I’m grateful that the centre will play a role in ACU’s efforts on behalf of graduate education as well.”
Which brings us to the centre’s namesake and benefactor, and to the question of how a generous philanthropic gift might shape the future of an entire academic discipline.
In Professor Green’s telling, Professor Emeritus Ray Hart has been an architect of religious studies as a field.
“He has an immense legacy in North America,” he says. “In addition to his scholarly work in philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, and his decanal leadership at Boston University, he led the American Academy of Religion in a variety of capacities across decades. He also founded the departments of religion through which the academic study of religion developed and advanced, from California to Florida and New York and everywhere in between.”
Ray L. Hart is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Boston University.
The centre will seek to honour this legacy, exploring Professor Hart’s interests in figures such as Augustine, Boehme, Schelling and Heidegger. While Professor Green’s own research has focused on other figures – within the same traditions but charting its own course – he’s clear that the centre won’t be narrowly defined by either.
“I would never attempt to legislate the character and limits of the field,” he says. “It is vast, and there is room for many orientations.”
When they last saw each other, Professor Hart cited Purgatorio, Canto 27: “I grant thee crown and mitre; to distrust thyself is henceforth error…”
It’s an encouraging thing for a mentor to say – an assertion of confidence. Professor Green will undoubtedly take strength from that in the years ahead, as he builds something that honours a legacy and creates space for new scholars yet to emerge.
He’s doing so in a place that, despite Melbourne’s reputation for having ‘four seasons in one day’, promises far more warmth and sunshine than the cold, dark winters of Montreal.
“The odd thing is I realise that we’ve picked the place that probably has the coldest weather in all of Australia, other than Tasmania,” he says.
Some traditions, it seems, you inherit whether you choose them or not.
Garth Green arrived in Melbourne in January 2026 as the inaugural Ray L. Hart Professor of Philosophy of Religion in ACU’s Faculty of Theology and Philosophy. His areas of expertise including philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, Renaissance theology (Nicholas of Cusa), German idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), and French phenomenology (Michel Henry).
Copyright@ Australian Catholic University 1998-2026 | ABN 15 050 192 660 CRICOS registered provider: 00004G | PRV12008
