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.

Emery's central argument is that scholars must recognize the social historical character of the statistics before using them as a basis for research. He defines "social" broadly to include both an external component (the ideologies, concerns, and processes in society that influenced civil registration officials) and an internal component (the complex way officials organized civil registration, which greatly affected the statistics). Thus he treats statutes, regulations, the content of registration forms, and definition of significant terms as part of the social history of the statistics, not as technical background material. The issues treated include the incomplete registration of vital events, the influence of different definitions of "live birth" on statistics for infant deaths, the nature of statistics for death by cause, and the problem of "residence" - the difference between vital events occurring in a municipality and those involving its residents. Emery places Ontario's vital statistics in the context of the international statistics movement and the development of the province's registration system. He then provides empirical illustrations of how aspects of definition influence the data and suggests strategies for responding to such problems. The chapter providing a case study of the completeness of mortality registrations for 1869 to 1972 was prepared in collaboration with Kevin McQuillan.

V. 3-5 biographical.