“Let’s See if we can go a Whole Day on the Road Eating Free Food”: Encountering the Divine with Claire Dwyer in the Private Spaces of Richmond’s Highway to Heaven

Abstract

This article recounts the development of the author’s positionality in studying religion in a Canadian suburb through a collaborative project with the late feminist geographer of religion Claire Dwyer. The field site was No. 5 Road, the “Highway to Heaven” in Richmond, British Columbia with over 20 religious institutions on a three kilometre stretch of road. Building from Dwyer’s writing on “encountering the divine” through field work from 2010 to 2012, the author offers an account of a personal shift from evangelical religious exclusivism to an understanding of the plurality of interreligious experience. Using a reflexive writing style, the article works through the discovery that each of the religious communities on the road saw themselves as private spaces into which the collaborative researchers were invited. “Encountering the divine” therefore tended to take place over meals inside the various religious buildings, leading to the personal transformation that the author describes. This article contributes to religious studies by offering an account of how the act of ethnographic field work can lead to a shift within a researcher’s own positionality, which must be brought reflexively and explicitly to the fore through the practice of research.