Download or read book Becoming Holy in Early Canada written by Timothy G. Pearson and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in holy figures in Canada. From the reputations of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI as prolific saint-makers to the canonization of two figures associated with Canada - Brother André Bessette in 2010 and Kateri Tekakwitha in 2012 - saints are suddenly in the news and a topic of conversation. In Becoming Holy in Early Canada, Timothy Pearson explores the roots of sanctity in Canada to discover why reputations for holiness developed in the early colonial period and how saints were made in the local and immediate contexts of everyday life. Pearson weaves together the histories of well-known figures such as Marie de l'Incarnation with those of largely forgotten local saints such as lay brother and carpenter Didace Pelletier and the Algonquin martyr Joseph Onaharé. Adopting an approach that draws on performance theory, ritual studies, and lived religion, he unravels the expectations, interactions, and negotiations that constituted holy performances. Because holy reputations developed over the course of individuals' lifetimes and in after-death relationships with local faith communities through belief in miracles, holy lives are best read as local, embedded, and contextualized histories. Placing colonial holy figures between the poles of local expectation and the universal Catholic theology of sanctity, Becoming Holy in Early Canada shows how reputations developed and individuals became local saints long before they came to the attention of the church in Rome.

Download or read book Native Americans Christianity and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape written by Joel W. Martin and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-10-11 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas gather emerging and leading voices in the study of Native American religion to reconsider the complex and often misunderstood history of Native peoples' engagement with Christianity and with Euro-American missionaries. Surveying mission encounters from contact through the mid-nineteenth century, the volume alters and enriches our understanding of both American Christianity and indigenous religion. The essays here explore a variety of postcontact identities, including indigenous Christians, "mission friendly" non-Christians, and ex-Christians, thereby exploring the shifting world of Native-white cultural and religious exchange. Rather than questioning the authenticity of Native Christian experiences, these scholars reveal how indigenous peoples negotiated change with regard to missions, missionaries, and Christianity. This collection challenges the pervasive stereotype of Native Americans as culturally static and ill-equipped to navigate the roiling currents associated with colonialism and missionization. The contributors are Emma Anderson, Joanna Brooks, Steven W. Hackel, Tracy Neal Leavelle, Daniel Mandell, Joel W. Martin, Michael D. McNally, Mark A. Nicholas, Michelene Pesantubbee, David J. Silverman, Laura M. Stevens, Rachel Wheeler, Douglas L. Winiarski, and Hilary E. Wyss.

Download or read book The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs written by Emma Anderson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-18 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1640s, eight Jesuit missionaries met their deaths at the hands of native antagonists. With their collective canonization in 1930, these men became North America's first saints. Emma Anderson untangles the complexities of these seminal acts of violence and their ever-changing legacy across the centuries. While exploring how Jesuit missionaries perceived their terrifying final hours, she also seeks to comprehend the motivations of those who confronted them from the other side of the axe, musket, or caldron of boiling water, and to illuminate the experiences of those native Catholics who, though they died alongside their missionary mentors, have yet to receive comparable recognition as martyrs. In tracing the creation and evolution of the cult of the martyrs across the centuries, Anderson reveals the ways in which both believers and detractors have honored andpreserved the memory of the martyrs in this "afterlife," and how their powerful story has been continually reinterpreted in the collective imagination. As rival shrines rose on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border, these figures would both unite and deeply divide natives and non-natives, francophones and anglophones, Protestants and Catholics, Canadians and Americans, forging a legacy as controversial as it has been enduring.

Download or read book A Touch of Fire written by Thomas M. Carr Jr and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marie-André Duplessis (1687-1760) guided the Augustinian sisters at the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec - the oldest hospital north of Mexico - where she was elected mother superior six times. Although often overshadowed by colonial nuns who became foundresses or saints, she was a powerhouse during the last decades of the French regime and an accomplished woman of letters. She has been credited with Canada’s first literary narrative, Canada’s first music manual, and the first book by a Canadian woman printed during her own lifetime. In A Touch of Fire, the first biography of Duplessis, Thomas Carr analyzes how she navigated, in peace and war, the unstable, male-dominated colonial world of New France. Through a study of Duplessis's correspondence, her writings, and the rich Hôtel-Dieu archives, Carr details how she channelled the fire of her commitment to the hospital in order to advance its interests, preserve its history, and inspire her sister nuns. Duplessis chronicled New France as she wrote for and about her institution. Her administrative correspondence reveals her managerial successes and failures, and her private letters reshaped her friendship with a childhood Jansenist friend, Marie-Catherine Hecquet. Carr also delves into her relationship with her sister Geneviève Duplessis, who joined her in the cloister and became her managerial and spiritual partner. The addition of Duplessis's last letters provides a dramatic insider's view into the female experience of the siege and capture of Quebec in 1759. A Touch of Fire examines the life and work of an enterprising leader and major woman author of early Canada.

Download or read book The Possession of Barbe Hallay written by Mairi Cowan and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-10-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When strange signs appeared in the sky over Québec during the autumn of 1660, people began to worry about evil forces in their midst. They feared that witches and magicians had arrived in the colony, and a teenaged servant named Barbe Hallay started to act as if she were possessed. The community tried to make sense of what was happening, and why. Priests and nuns performed rituals to drive the demons away, while the bishop and the governor argued about how to investigate their suspicions of witchcraft. A local miller named Daniel Vuil, accused of using his knowledge of the dark arts to torment Hallay, was imprisoned and then executed. Stories of the demonic infestation circulated through the small settlement on the St Lawrence River for several years. In The Possession of Barbe Hallay Mairi Cowan revisits these stories to understand the everyday experiences and deep anxieties of people in New France. Her findings offer insight into beliefs about demonology and witchcraft, the limits of acceptable adolescent behaviour, the dissonance between a Catholic colony in theory and the church’s wavering influence in practice, the contested authority accorded to women as healers, and the insecurities of the colonial project. As the people living through the events knew at the time, and as this study reveals, New France was in a precarious position. The Possession of Barbe Hallay is both a fascinating account of a case of demonic possession and an accessible introduction to social and religious history in early modern North America.

Download or read book From Mother to Son written by mère Marie de l'Incarnation and published by AAR Religions in Translation. This book was released on 2014 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marie de l'Incarnation (1599 - 1672), renowned French mystic and founder of the Ursulines in Canada, abandoned her son, Claude Martin, when he was a mere eleven years old to dedicate herself completely to a consecrated religious life. In 1639, Marie migrated to the struggling French colony at Quebec to found the first Ursuline convent in the New World. Over the course of the next thirty-one years, the relationship between Marie and Claude would take shape by means of a trans-Atlantic correspondence in which mother and son shared advice and counsel, concerns and anxieties, and joys and frustrations. From Mother to Son presents annotated translations of forty-one of the eighty-one extant full-length letters exchanged by Marie and her son between 1640 and 1671. These letters reveal much about the early history of New France and the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century. Uniting the letters into a coherent whole is the distinctive relationship between an absent mother and her abandoned son, a relationship reconfigured from flesh and blood to the written word exchanged between professed religious united in Jesus Christ as members of the same spiritual family. In providing a contemporary translation of Marie's letters to Claude, Mary Dunn renders accessible to an English-speaking readership a rich source for the history of colonial North America, providing a counterpoint to a narrative weighted in favor of Plymouth Rock and the Puritans and a history of New France dominated by the perspectives of men both religious and secular. Dunn expertly contextualizes the correspondence within the broader cultural, historical, intellectual, and theological currents of the seventeenth century as well as within modern scholarship on Marie de l'Incarnation. From Mother to Son offers a fascinating portrait of the nature and evolution of Marie's relationship with her son. By highlighting the great range of their conversation, Dunn provides a window onto one of the more intriguing and complicated stories of maternal and filial affection in the modern Christian West.

Download or read book Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture written by Robin Macdonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-20 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, res-ponding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.

Download or read book A Black American Missionary in Canada written by Hilary Bates Neary and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lewis Champion Chambers is one of the forgotten figures of Canadian Black history and the history of religion in Canada. Born enslaved in Maryland, Chambers purchased his freedom as a young man before moving to Canada West in 1854; there he farmed and in time served as a pastor and missionary until 1868. Between 1858 and 1867 he wrote nearly one hundred letters to the secretary of the American Missionary Association in New York, describing the progress of his work and the challenges faced by his community. Now preserved in the collections of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, Chambers’s letters provide a rare perspective on the everyday lives of Black settlers during a formative period in Canadian history. Hilary Neary presents Chambers’s letters, weaving into a compelling narrative his vivid accounts of ministering in forest camps and small urban churches, establishing Sabbath schools and temperance societies, combating prejudice, and offering spiritual encouragement. Chambers’s life as an American in Canada intersected with significant events in nineteenth-century Black history: manumission, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. Throughout, Chambers’s fervent Christian faith highlights and reflects the pivotal role of the Black church – African Methodist Episcopal (United States) and British Methodist Episcopal (Canada) – in the lives of the once enslaved. As North Americans explore afresh their history of race and racism, A Black American Missionary in Canada elevates an important voice from the nineteenth-century Black community to deepen knowledge of Canadian history.

Download or read book Missions Begin with Blood written by Brandon Bayne and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2022 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. Whether petitioning superiors for support, preparing to extirpate Native “idolatries,” or protecting their conversions from critics, Jesuits found power in their persecution and victory in their victimization. This book correlates these tales of sacrifice to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how martyrological idioms worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, missionaries invoked an agricultural metaphor that reconfigured suffering into seed that, when watered by sweat and blood, would one day bring a rich harvest of Indigenous Christianity.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque written by John D. Lyons and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 907 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baroque, the cultural period extending from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, created some of the world's most striking monuments, music, artworks, and literature. This Handbook goes beyond all existing studies by presenting Baroque not only as a style, but also as a global cultural phenomenon arising in response to enormous religious, political, and technological changes.

Download or read book Not Quite Us written by Kevin P. Anderson and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In twentieth-century Canada, mainline Protestants, fundamentalists, liberal nationalists, monarchists, conservative Anglophiles, and left-wing intellectuals had one thing in common: they all subscribed to a centuries-old world view that Catholicism was an authoritarian, regressive, untrustworthy, and foreign force that did not fit into a democratic, British nation like Canada. Analyzing the connections between anti-Catholicism and national identity in English Canada, Not Quite Us examines the consistency of anti-Catholic tropes in the public and private discourses of intellectuals, politicians, and clergymen, such as Arthur Lower, Eugene Forsey, Harold Innis, C.E. Silcox, F.R. Scott, George Drew, and Emily Murphy, along with those of private Canadians. Challenging the misconception that an allegedly secular, civic, and more tolerant nationalism that emerged excised its Protestant and British cast, Kevin Anderson determines that this nationalist narrative was itself steeped in an exclusionary Anglo-Protestant understanding of history and values. He shows that over time, as these ideas were dispersed through editorials, cartoons, correspondence, literature, and lectures, they influenced Canadians' intimate perceptions of themselves and their connection to Britain, the ethno-religious composition of the nation, the place of religion in public life, and national unity. Anti-Catholicism helped shape what it means to be "Canadian" in the twentieth century. Not Quite Us documents how equating Protestantism with democracy and individualism permeated ideas of national identity and continues to define Canada into the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Scandal in the Parish written by Karen E. Carter and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1770, the priest Nicolas Vernier was accused of neglecting church services, inappropriate behaviour in the confessional, financial improprieties, and affairs with the village schoolmistresses. In a contentious church court case, parishioners described all of their priest's wrongdoings, and in turn, he detailed many of theirs. Ultimately, Vernier finished his career as a cathedral canon in another diocese. Scandal in the Parish recounts Vernier's story and many similar eighteenth-century cases. In fascinating detail that reveals essential facets of rural religion during the Catholic Reformation period, Karen Carter considers French lay people's relationship with their parish curé, who governed and influenced so much of their religious practice. Although the priest's role as purveyor of God's grace through the sacraments was secure as long as he performed his duties appropriately, priests who were unable to navigate the pressures and high expectations put on them by their superiors and parishioners risked broken relationships, public disturbances of the peace, and even prosecution. These scandals, Carter demonstrates, tell us much about rural parish life, the processes of negotiation and accommodation between curés and their parishioners, and ongoing religious reforms and enforcement throughout the eighteenth century. An engaging venture into the world of the parish that highlights the centrality of the priest-parishioner relationship, Scandal in the Parish reveals the attitudes and practices of ordinary people who were active agents in their religious and spiritual lives.

Download or read book Beyond the Noise of Solemn Assemblies written by Richard Allen and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1970s Richard Allen's scholarship on the social gospel has broken new ground in the field of Canadian social and religious history by recovering key aspects of the tradition and its contribution to reform movements and politics. Beyond the Noise of Solemn Assemblies collects and extends many of his classic works to present a comprehensive overview of a major thread in the fabric of the country. Observing the mutual foundations of political and religious traditions in myth and arguing that the sacred and the secular belong together in discussions of public affairs, Allen contests the view that religion is personal and isolated from the public square. He discusses a range of topics: the transition from providential to progressive thought in nineteenth-century Canada; the new spirituality of social solidarity articulated by Winnipeg college students in the 1890s; the role of the social gospel in pioneering urban reform; farmers and workers finding in radical Christianity legitimation for political revolt; Christian intellectuals in the 1930s framing a revolutionary prospectus for Depression-era Canada; the significance of Norman Bethune's religious upbringing for his life and work; strategically focused post-war ecumenical coalitions like Project North and the Latin American Working Group; and the prospects for democratic socialism at the end of the Cold War. Opening with a chapter relating the author's upbringing in a ministerial household dedicated to the Protestant ethic as the spirit of socialism, Beyond the Noise of Solemn Assemblies represents a significant contribution to understanding the social Christian movement in Canada.

Download or read book Patriot and Priest written by Annette Chapman-Adisho and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1790, the French revolutionary government reformed the Catholic Church and demanded that clerics swear an oath of allegiance to the nation and its vision for French Catholicism. Although half of France's parish clergy refused to accept the state-sponsored reforms, others became embroiled in this decade-long ecclesiastical experiment. This included Jean-Baptiste Volfius, a patriot, priest, and professor who embraced the changes in France and believed in the revolution's potential to create a purer church. Patriot and Priest presents a social and intellectual history of the French constitutional church in the Côte-d'Or and the career of Volfius, who became its bishop in 1791, as he struggled to create and run the church. Annette Chapman-Adisho addresses the daily experience of the constitutional clergy over the course of ten years, exploring the interactions between priests and local and national authorities, the response of the laity to the divisions in the French Catholic Church, the evolution of these issues over time, and the eventual reconciliation of the clergy following the Napoleonic Concordat with Pope Pius VII in 1801. Using a rich collection of archival sources, this book demonstrates that although the constitutional church was ultimately a failed project, its legacy had a lasting impact on the catholic Church in France. Tracing the social, political, and theological history of this reform effort, Patriot and Priest offers new insights into the French Revolution and its impact on French Catholicism.

Download or read book Protestant Liberty written by James M. Forbes and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism dominated politics in nineteenth-century Canada, occasionally erupting into violence. While some liberal politicians and community leaders believed that equal treatment of Protestants and Catholics would defuse these ancient quarrels, other Protestant liberals perceived a battle for the soul of the nation. Protestant Liberty offers a new interpretation of nineteenth-century liberalism by re-examining the role of religion in Canadian politics. While this era’s liberal thought is often characterized as being neutral toward religion, James Forbes argues that the origins of Canadian liberalism were firmly rooted in the British tradition of Protestantism and were based on the premise of guarding against the advance of supposedly illiberal faiths, especially Catholicism. After the union of Upper Canada with predominantly French-Catholic Lower Canada in 1840, this Protestant ideal of liberty came into conflict with a more neutral alternative that sought to strip liberalism of its religious associations in order to appeal to Catholic voters and allies. In a decisive break from their Protestant heritage, these liberals redefined their ideology in secular-materialist terms by emphasizing free trade and private property over faith and culture. In tracing how the Confederation generation competed to establish a unifying vision for the nation, Protestant Liberty reveals religion and religious differences at the centre of this story.

Download or read book Faithful Encounters written by Emrah Şahin and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early twentieth century, there were close to two hundred American missionaries working in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. They came in droves as early as 1830, organizing hundreds of schools, hospitals, printing presses, and seminaries. Until now, the missionaries' sources and perspectives have dominated discussions of this moment in history, but the experiences of the Ottoman authorities are just as, if not more, revealing of an increasingly tense relationship between Christianity and Islam. An enthralling narrative of how locals made sense of American religious activity in the Ottoman Empire, Faithful Encounters examines the relationships between the authorities who managed the empire from the capital city of Istanbul, provincial agents who carried out the capital's orders, and the missionaries who engaged with them. Exploring a wide range of untapped sources – from imperial ministries, security forces, and local petitions to international reports and missionary collections – Emrah Sahin traces the interactions of the Ottoman authorities, focusing on the viewpoints and manoeuvres they adopted to monitor and conquer the missionary presence at a time of turbulent public and political upheaval. Offering a comparative context from which to reconsider recent cultural relations in the region, Faithful Encounters is not only a history of Christian and Muslim relations. It is a lesson about a failing mission in a failing empire, with stunning relevance to the looming religious and ethnic crises of today.

Download or read book A B Simpson and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism written by Daryn Henry and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-12-26 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A shrewd synthesizer, gifted popularizer, and inspiring founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance movement, A.B. Simpson (1843–1919) was enmeshed in the most crucial threads of evangelical Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century. Daryn Henry presents Simpson's life and ministry as a vivid, fascinating, and paradigmatic study in evangelical religious culture, during a time when the conservative wing of the movement has often been overlooked. Simpson's ministry, Henry explains, fused the classic evangelical emphasis on revivalist conversion with the intensification of that sensibility in the quest for the deeper Christian life of holiness. Recovering the practice of divine healing, Simpson emphasized a dynamically empowered and supernaturally animated Christianity that would spill over into nascent Pentecostalism. His encouragement of cross-cultural missions was part of a trend that unleashed the dramatic rise of world Christianity across the Global South. All the while, his Biblical literalism, antagonism to modernist theology, campaigns against evolution, and views on premillennialism, Biblical prophecy, and the role of Israel in the end times made Simpson a precursor of the fundamentalist melees of subsequent decades. From his upbringing in rural Canada and confessional Scottish Presbyterianism, Simpson journeyed into the heart of American evangelicalism revolving around his base in New York City. Against most previous writing on Simpson, Henry's biography presents both continuities and discontinuities in the development of modern interdenominational evangelicalism out of the denominational evangelicalism of the nineteenth century.