Editions SR

The story of the consecrated life in Canada since the 1960s should be about much more than numerical decline. Although the falling numbers are significant among Catholic religious in communities that pre-date Vatican II, many communities continue to show stability and even growth. This book provides nuance to that story by adding detailed portraits of movements, communities and institutions. In four parts, this book presents essays from the leading scholars on religious life in Canada that seek to address the state of religious communities dedicated to religious virtuosity normally characterized by formal promises of chastity, poverty, and obedience. The essays examine a broad range of topics related to the general state of consecrated (or "religious" or "monastic") life in contemporary Canadian Christian and Buddhist traditions. In the first section, the contributors trace the demographics and definitions of religious life in Canada. The second section examines Canadian developments in Catholic religious life during the Vatican II and the post-Vatican II eras. A third section explores trends in contemporary Canadian religious life, while the fourth section describes the consecrated life in other Canadian religious traditions.

The New Canadian Pentecostals takes readers into the everyday religious lives of the members of three Pentecostal congregations located in the Region of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Using the rich qualitative and quantitative data gathered through participant observation, personal interviews, and surveys conducted within these congregations, Adam Stewart provides the first book-length study focusing on the specific characteristics of Canadian Pentecostal identity, belief, and practice. Stewart asserts that Pentecostalism remains an important tradition in the Canadian religious landscape-contrary to the assumptions of many Canadian sociologists and scholars of religion. Recent decreases in Canadian Pentecostal affiliation recorded by Statistics Canada are not the result of Pentecostals abandoning their congregations; rather, they are indicative of a radical transformation from traditionally Pentecostal to generically evangelical modes of religious identity, belief, and practice that are changing the ways that Pentecostals understand and explain their religious identities. The case study presented in this book suggests that a new breed of Canadian Pentecostals are emerging for whom traditional definitions and expressions of Pentecostalism are much less important than religious autonomy and individualism.

In Canadian universities in the early 1960s, no courses were offered on Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam. Only the study of Christianity was available, usually in a theology program in a church college or seminary. Today almost every university in North America has a religious studies department that offers courses on Western and Eastern religions as well as religion in general. Harold Coward addresses this change in this memoir of his forty-five-year career in the development of religious studies as a new academic field in Canada. He also addresses the shift from theology classes in seminaries to non-sectarian religious studies faculties of arts and humanities; the birth and growth of departments across Canada from the 1960s to the present; the contribution of McMaster University to religious studies in Canada and Coward's Ph.D. experience there; the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria; and the future of religious studies as a truly interdisciplinary enterprise. Coward's retrospective, while not a history as such, documents information from his varied experience and wide network of colleagues that is essential for a future formal history of the discipline. His story is both personally engaging and richly informative about the development of the field.

Reinhold Niebuhr was a twentieth-century American theologian who was known for his commentary on public affairs. One of his most influential ideas was the relating of his Christian faith to realism rather than idealism in foreign affairs. His perspective influenced many liberals and is enjoying a resurgence today; most recently Barack Obama has acknowledged Niebuhr's importance to his own thinking. In this book, Kenneth Hamilton makes a claim that no other work on Niebuhr has made-that Niebuhr's chief and abiding preoccupation throughout his long career was the nature of humankind. Hamilton engages in a close reading of Niebuhr's entire oeuvre through this lens. He argues that this preoccupation remained consistent throughout Niebuhr's writings, and that through his doctrine of humankind one gets a full sense of Niebuhr the theologian. Hamilton exposes not only the internal consistency of Niebuhr's project but also its aporia. Although Niebuhr's influence perhaps peaked in the mid-twentieth century, enthusiasm for his approach to religion and politics has never waned from the North American public theology, and this work remains relevant today. Although Hamilton wrote this thesis in the mid-1960s it is published here for the first time. Jane Barter Moulaison, in her editorial gloss and introduction, demonstrates the abiding significance of Hamilton's work to the study of Niebuhr by bringing it into conversation with subsequent writings on Niebuhr, particularly as he is re-appropriated by twenty-first-century American theology.

Shattering the Illusion is the first book to gather and comparatively analyze policies addressing child sexual abuse complaints in a selection of religious institutions in Canada. Although there is a substantial body of literature regarding Christianity and sexual abuse, very little of it focuses on religious institutions in Canada and their respective policies. In the foreword, Tracey J. Trothen summarizes the Cornwall Inquiry, out of which this book arose. She then examines the Roman Catholic Church, The United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church, the Mennonite Church, Islam, and the Canadian Unitarian Council/Unitarian Universalist Association, describing in detail the evolution and particular content of policies and procedures that address child sexual abuse complaints directed at paid and volunteer faith community representatives and/ or leaders. She identifies differences and common themes among the approaches taken by the institutions and provides a summary table for an accessible comparative overview. Child sexual abuse is not new, but the emergence of policies to address abuse complaints within religious institutions is. This book identifies significant and shared causal factors behind the emergence of policy and reviews their content carefully. This review will serve as a significant tool for furthering the development of such policies.

From Logos to Christos is a collection of essays in Christology written by friends and colleagues in memory of Joanne McWilliam. McWilliam was a pioneer woman in the academic study of theology, specializing in Patristic studies and internationally recognized for her work on Augustine. For countless students she was a teacher, a mentor, an inspiration. These fourteen essays are a fitting tribute to her memory. Written by recognized North American scholars, the essays explore various aspects of Christology, inviting the reader to probe the meaning and significance of Jesus Christ for today. They address a broad range of issues, including the Christology of the Acts of Thomas, Hooker on divinization, and Christ figures in contemporary Canadian culture. Teachers of theology and religious studies, pastors, and informed general readers will find the essays stimulating and instructive. They present the readers with considered, mature, and current scholarship. These are the questions that engaged Joanne McWilliam throughout her life, and she was happy to know that the critical dialogue would continue in this volume as friends and colleagues wrestled with Christological questions. For her, "In Jesus we come to know the compassion, the power, the wisdom, the love, and the faithfulness of God".

The introduction of Aristotelianism into the West created conflict, disruption, and turmoil. Not least, it confronted the Middle Ages with a serious problem concerning the possible conflict between reason and faith. In part, the controversy surrounding Aristotelianism in the Christian world came from the Islamic channels through which much of the Aristotelian philosophical heritage came to the West. The great turning point of Christian thought, the point at which Christian intellectual history began to be dominated by Aristotelian patterns, began when Christian scholars were exposed not only to the philosophy of Aristotle, but also to the commentaries of Averroes. The names of Averroes and Aristotle became inextricably linked by the middle of the thirteenth century. A clear and careful analysis of the links between the thoughts of Averroes and Aristotle, an explication of the impact of Averroes' thought on Christian theology and on Aquinas in particular, this monograph is of crucial importance in the history of Christianity. It is emphatically apposite to the discussion of monistic and qualistic theological anthropologies. Further, the discussion throws light upon a topic which should be of much greater interest to scholars: the impact of Islam upon medieval Christian thought. Mohammed centres specifically upon Averroes' doctrine of immortality-a doctrine that posited immortality for man as a being entire, not merely for his soul.

A history of Chinese immigrants encounter with Canadian Protestant missionaries, "His Dominion" and the "Yellow Peril": Protestant Missions to Chinese Immigrants in Canada, 1859-1967, analyzes the evangelizing activities of missionaries and the role of religion in helping Chinese immigrants affirm their ethnic identity in a climate of cultural conflict. Jiwu Wang argues that, by working toward a vision of Canada that espoused Anglo-Saxon Protestant values, missionaries inevitably reinforced popular cultural stereotypes about the Chinese and widened the gap between Chinese and Canadian communities. Those immigrants who did embrace the Christian faith felt isolated from their community and their old way of life, but they were still not accepted by mainstream society. Although the missionaries' goal was to assimilate the Chinese into Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, it was Chinese religion and cultural values that helped the immigrants maintain their identity and served to protect them from the intrusion of the Protestant missions. Wang documents the methods used by the missionaries and the responses from the Chinese community, noting the shift in approach that took place in the 1920s, when the clergy began to preach respect for Chinese ways and sought to welcome them into Protestant-Canadian life. Although in the early days of the missions, Chinese Canadians rejected the evangelizing to take what education they could from the missionaries, as time went on and prejudice lessened, they embraced the Christian faith as a way to gain acceptance as Canadians.

Our ancestors saw the material world as alive, and they often personified nature. Today we claim to be realists. But in reality we are not paying attention to the symbols and myths hidden in technology. Beneath much of our talk about computers and the Internet, claims William A. Stahl, is an unacknowledged mysticism, an implicit religion. By not acknowledging this mysticism, we have become critically short of ethical and intellectual resources with which to understand and confront changes brought on by technology.