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.

Collection of articles about the history of missions from an African-American perspective.

"臺勢教會 The Taiwanese Making of the Canada Presbyterian Mission" explores the Canadian Presbyterian Mission to Northern Taiwan, 1872-1915. The Canada Presbyterian Mission has often been portrayed as one of the nineteenth- century’s most successful missions, and its founder, George Leslie Mackay, has been called the most successful Protestant Missionary of all time. Mark Dodge challenges the heroic narrative by exploring the motives and actions of the Taiwanese actors who supported and established the mission. Religious leaders, teachers, doctors, and businessmen from Northern Taiwan collaborated to build a strong and vital mission, whose phenomenal success brought fame and status to Mackay and their cause. In turn, this status provided a protective space in which these Taiwanese patrons were able to exert significant economic and political autonomy in spite of pressures from competing colonial interests. This book will be of particular interest to students and historians of nineteenth-century East Asia as well as scholars of comparative colonialism, with a focus on missionary history and cultural colonialism.

Changing social and cultural strategies pursued by Protestant and Catholic religious institutions have shaped the social order in Quebec and English Canada. Through a sustained comparison of Protestantism and Catholicism, this volume explores the transition from pre-industrial to industrial society and challenges conventional chronologies of religious change.

In A History of Canadian Catholics Terence Fay relates the long story of the Catholic Church and its followers, beginning with how the church and its adherents came to Canada, how the church established itself, and how Catholic spirituality played a part in shaping Canadian society. He also describes how recent social forces have influenced the church. Using an abundance of sources, Fay discusses Gallicanism (French spirituality), Romanism (Roman spirituality), and Canadianism - the indigenisation of Catholic spirituality in the Canadian lifestyle. Fay begins with a detailed look at the struggle of French Catholics to settle a new land, including their encounters with the Amerindians. He analyses the conflict caused by the arrival of the Scottish and Irish Catholics, which threatened Gallican church control. Under Bishops Bourget and Lynch, the church promoted a romantic vision of Catholic unity in Canada. By the end of the century, however, German, Ukrainian, Polish, and Hungarian immigrants had begun to challenge the French and Irish dominance of Catholic life and provide the foundation of a multicultural church. With the creation of the Canadian Catholic Conference in the postwar period these disparate groups were finally drawn into a more unified Canadian church. A History of Canadian Catholics is especially timely for students of religion and history and will also be of interest to the general reader who would like an understanding the development of Catholic roots in Canadian soil.

Blood Ground traces the transition from religion to race as the basis for policing the boundaries of the "white" community. Elbourne suggests broader shifts in the relationship of missions to colonialism B as the British movement became less internationalist, more respectable, and more emblematic of the British imperial project B and shows that it is symptomatic that many Christian Khoekhoe ultimately rebelled against the colony. Missionaries across the white settler empire brokered bargains B rights in exchange for cultural change, for example B that brought Aboriginal peoples within the aegis of empire but, ultimately, were only partially and ambiguously fulfilled.

"As Canadian as the maple leaf" is how one observer summed up the United Church of Canada after its founding in 1925. But was this Canadian-made church flawed in its design, as critics have charged? A Church with the Soul of a Nation explores this question by weaving together the history of the United Church with a provocative analysis of religion and cultural change.

Semple covers virtually every aspect of Canadian Methodism. He examines early nineteenth-century efforts to evangelize pioneer British North America and the revivalistic activities so important to the mid-nineteenth-century years. He documents Methodists' missionary work both overseas and in Canada among aboriginal peoples and immigrants. He analyses the Methodist contribution to Canadian education and the leadership the church provided for the expansion of the role of women in society. He also assesses the spiritual and social dimensions of evangelical religion in the personal lives of Methodists, addressing such social issues as prohibition, prostitution, the importance of the family, and changing attitudes toward children in Methodist doctrine and Canada in general. Semple argues that Methodism evolved into the most Canadian of all the churches, helping to break down the geographic, political, economic, ethnic, and social divisions that confounded national unity. Although the Methodist Church did not achieve the universality it aspired to, he concludes that it succeeded in defining the religious, political, and social agenda for the Protestant component of Canada, providing a powerful legacy of service to humanity and to God.

Ontario’s African-Canadian Heritage is composed of the collected works of Professor Fred Landon, who for more than 60 years wrote about African-Canadian history. The selected articles have, for the most part, never been surpassed by more recent research and offer a wealth of data on slavery, abolition, the Underground Railroad, and more, providing unique insights into the abundance of African-Canadian heritage in Ontario. Though much of Landons research was published in the Ontario Historical Societys journal, Ontario History, some of the articles reproduced here appeared in such prestigious U.S. publications as the Journal of Negro History. This volume, illustrated and extensively annotated, includes research by the editors into the life of Fred Landon. It is the Legacy Project for the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, an initiative of the OHS, funded by a "Roots of Freedom" grant received from the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.

This illustrated collection offers a wealth of data on slavery, abolition, the Underground Railroad, providing unique insights into the African-Canadian heritage in Ontario.