Robert Crouse
| Robert Crouse | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1930 Crousetown |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of King's College |
| Academic work | |
Dr. Robert Darwin Crouse (1930-2011), was a Canadian religious philosopher.
Receiving his primary and secondary education in the village school of Crousetown and at King’s Collegiate School in Windsor contributed much to his love of music and of learning. One writer at the Collegiate School judges him the most outstanding scholar it graduated in its 223 year history. He arrived at Dalhousie University and King’s College in 1947, the year James Doull began teaching in the Classics Department. Robert graduated in Classics in 1951 and then spent a year studying philosophy at Dalhousie and theology at King’s. He organised at King’s a “revolutionary cell” of the Society of the Catholic Commonwealth, devoted to bringing together Marxism and Anglo-Catholicism; members read Aquinas and Marx. The authorities of the Anglican Diocese and King’s were unable to decide which was the more subversive and established a body, labelled the “Inquisition” by the students, to root out the theological and politically erroneous. It continued its work into the 1960s.
When Robert decamped to Harvard to read Divinity, he moved into the Cambridge Oratory of the Society. He broke with it in 1953, although he continued to inspire students to read Das Kapital, and his cousin, Dr Gary Ramey, now the socialist member of the Provincial Legislature for Lunenburg County, reports that his last meeting with Dr Crouse was when Robert dropped by to contribute to his campaign. He and the satirist Tom Lehrer were roommates at Harvard and from him Robert handed on the lyrics of “The Vatican Rag” and “God Bless Free Enterprise, System Divine.” In the Harvard Divinity School, Harry Wolfson pushed him to add German to his Greek, Latin and French. Robert consolidated it with a year of study at Tubingen in 1955. By way of his work on Dante, and his years of teaching in Italy at the Ambrosianum and the Augustinianum, he acquired Italian. Robert was a paradigm of the union of complete rootedness in his birthplace and international sophistication which has characterised seafaring Nova Scotia with its face to Europe, its right arm extended to Boston and the Caribbean, and its back to Canada. Harvard granted him an S.T.B. (cum lauda) in 1954 and he was ordained priest by the Anglican Bishop of Nova Scotia. Nonetheless, the Diocese of Nova Scotia and the Canadian church never ceased suspecting him of subversion.
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