Willard G. Oxtoby
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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.
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.
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.
Oxtoby's first teaching job was at McGill University in Montreal, QC, 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.
Oxtoby was married to Layla Jurji (1935-1980) and, after her death from cancer, to Julia Ching (1934-2001). Oxtoby died of cancer on March 6, 2003.
