Religion Family And Community In Victorian Canada

Van Die, a sympathetic and perceptive observer and a gifted and deft interpreter, describes the lives of the Colbys of Carrollcroft - members of Canada's emerging economic elite who were active in the local community, public life, and politics - drawing attention to the links connecting domestic religion and private life, business concerns, and social change in one family's life over three generations.

"The lives of the Colby family offer insights into the construction and practice of domestic religion and the moral and social legislation of early post-Confederation Canada. Taking a multidisciplinary approach that locates the home rather than the church as the primary site of religious change, Van Die concludes that the origins and continuity of Protestant religion in Victorian Canada depended on a unique set of socioeconomic and cultural forces. Religion, Family, and Community in Victorian Canada is an intimate portrait of "lived religion" as experienced by a middle-class family over three generations."--Jacket.

By examinng education, charity, community discipline, the relationship between clergy and congregations, and working-class religion, the contributors shift the field of religious history into the realm of the socio-cultural. This novel perspective reveals that the Christian churches remained dynamic and popular in English and French Canada, as well as among immigrants, well into the twentieth century.

In this volume some of the outstanding Christian scholars of our day reflect on how their minds have changed, how their academic fields have changed over the course of their careers, and the pressing issues that Christian scholars will need to address in the twenty-first century. This volume offers an accessible portrait of key trends in the world of Christian scholarship today. Christian Thought in the Twenty-First Century features scholars from Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and Switzerland. The contributors represent a wide variety of academic backgrounds--from biblical studies to theology, to religious studies, to history, English literature, philosophy, law, and ethics. This book offers a personal glimpse of Christian scholars in a self-reflective mode, capturing their honest reflections on the changing state of the academy and on changes in their own minds and outlooks. The breadth and depth of insight afforded by these contributions provide rich soil for a reader's own reflections, and an agenda that will occupy Christian thinkers well into the twenty-first century.

Across history, the ideas and practices of male identity have varied much between time and place: masculinity proves to be a slippery concept, not available to all men, sometimes even applied to women. This book analyses the dynamics of 'masculinity' as both an ideology and lived experience - how men have tried, and failed, to be 'Real Men'.

Religion is fundamental to contemporary Puerto Rican society. From the cosmology of the Indigenous Taíno, to the wide range of Judeo-Christian churches and sects, to the practitioners of spiritism, Afro-Caribbean religions, and witchcraft, religious practice in its many forms permeates the lives of most Puerto Ricans. Communities of the Soul illuminates the landscape and history of religion in Puerto Rico from the beliefs and practices of the Taíno to the religious diversity of the present day. Throughout its history, religion in Puerto Rico has braided institutional forms and popular practices, yet has always been a community-based process – made by the people. When the island was under Spanish colonial rule, the formal but weak presence of Catholicism meant that Puerto Ricans cultivated their religious experiences within families and local communities as much as within the structures of the church. These communal practices continued as Puerto Ricans joined Protestant denominations – particularly evangelical Pentecostalism – after the American conquest of the island in 1898. In the second half of the twentieth century, religious diversity increased with the formation of Jewish and Muslim communities, as well as numerous local evangelical congregations. Even as Puerto Rican society becomes more cosmopolitan and diverse, popular devotions and ritualistic practices remain an important part of everyday life. The first synthesis of the religious history of the island, Communities of the Soul is an innovative exploration of religion in Puerto Rico and the beliefs, practices, and diversity of its past and present.

Joaquim Marques de Araújo ardently defended the Portuguese Inquisition for fifty years, only to find himself sidelined and forgotten. In Defence of the Faith offers an insightful examination of one man's career as a comissário of the Portuguese Inquisition in Pernambuco, Brazil, from 1770 to 1820. James Wadsworth argues that as legal extensions of the inquisitors in Lisbon, the comissários played a role far superior to what their small numbers might suggest. They were not the psychopaths, fanatics, or secret network of spies so common in the popular imagination. Rather, they were the linchpins in the inquisitional system that policed the orthodoxy of the Catholic flock and qualified candidates for inquisitional office. Joaquim Marques's career demonstrates that comissários had considerable room to manoeuvre, though they remained distinctly vulnerable to social and political shifts in power. His story reveals an institution divided against itself, which proved unwilling or unable to support its men in the field. Consequently, Joaquim Marques's attempts to protect himself and the Inquisition from attack proved futile. He died a defeated man on the eve of the political, intellectual, and spiritual upheaval he had long predicted and resisted. In Defence of the Faith is a study of the decline of the old regime and the rise of a new order in late-colonial Brazil as experienced by an unbending agent of a once powerful institution that slowly collapsed during his lifetime.

British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon. Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in frontier BC, a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settlers. This nuanced study of mobility, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.