Assistant Professor of Religious Education
Email: phillip.ganir@bc.edu
Catechesis; Mystagogy; Theology and Musicking; Religious Education through Music; Sacred Music in Worship; Music and The Jesuits; James MacMillan Studies; Asian American and Pacific Islander Catholic Communities
Born in Seattle and raised in Honolulu, Fr. Ganir joined the US West Province of the Jesuits in 1999 after earning his BA in Political Science and Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii. As a Jesuit he completed music degrees at the Manhattan School of Music where he studied voice with Maitland Peters, and at the University of Notre Dame where he trained in the choral conducting studios of Carmen-Helena Téllez and Mark Doerries. At the Catholic University of America, he completed a PhD in Catechetics and wrote on the mystagogical dimension of James MacMillan’s fifth symphony Le grand Inconnu for his dissertation. He has been published in the Journal of Religious Education and The International Journal of Evangelization and Catechetics, and has worked as an Assistant Producer to the University of Notre Dame’s production and recording of Dante’s Divine Comedy funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Through Boston College he has recently co-produced a premiere of San Francisco Xavier, a restored indigenous Bolivian opera from the Jesuit Reductions, and he is currently working with a five-member research team on a Lilly funded grant which studies the state of children’s liturgical participation in the American Catholic Church.