SOURCE: Burbidge, John W. “Religion in Morley Callaghan's Such Is My Beloved.” Journal of Canadian Studies 27, no. 3 (fall 1992): 105-14.

In the following essay, Burbidge elucidates Callaghan's treatment of religion in Such Is My Beloved, viewing the novel as a commentary on the “Song of Songs.”

In his seminal work, The Meaning and End of Religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith challenged a common assumption, one which holds that religion is an entity that can be isolated, defined and studied like other topics of scholarly inquiry. Only in periods when pluralism reigns do people talk about religions in the plural, and distinguish them by such names as Buddhism, Protestantism and Judaism. Naming implies that there is something referred to by those names, and scholars struggle to define what that something is.¹

Over most of its history, however, the word “religion” referred not to a thing but to a stance, a characteristic...