Prophets, Priests and Prodigals : Readings In Canadian Religious History, 1608 To Present

by Mark G McGowan David B. Marshall, Mark G. Marshall

Paperback

Published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great collection on a diverse number of topics and themes around Canada's Christian history, although a may be a bit biased considering one of the editors supervised my MA work. The main themes that run throughout the book include Christianity and Canadian identity, the question of secularization, and the role of religious history in understanding broader Canadian topics. In this sense, it is a success. Of course, it doesn't completely answer if Canada has thrown its religious identity in the trash but it does provide a variety of articles that tackle the question in different ways. A few articles venture outside Protestantism and focus on Catholicism (Ukrainian and Irish) and Judaism. The articles on the New Lights movement and Prairie Utopianism were particularly interesting to me. This collection isn't free from flaws. While its publication date may excuse some of the outdated language (referring to Ukrainian peasants with the pronoun "his" or calling the Inuit people "Eskimos" being the worst examples of this) I couldn't help but feel that several of this articles failed to engage in topics like gender, feminism, and post-modernism that would have been more than relevant at the time of publication (exception to this would be Marta Danylewycz's amazing article).

Nonetheless, I find myself returning to this collection again and again for its collection of insights.