Salem Goldworth Bland (1859-1950) was among the most significant religious leaders in Canadian history. A Methodist and, later, United Church minister, Bland's long career and widespread influence made him a leading figure in the popularizing of liberal theology, social reform, and the Social Gospel movement. He was also a man who struggled with the polarities of evangelical faith and worldly culture, and who sought a unifying world-view in the mentoring of Sir J. William Dawson in the sciences, George Monro Grant in public affairs, and John Watson in philosophy. The View from the Murney Tower is a two-volume biography of Salem Bland by Richard Allen, author of The Social Passion: Religion and Reform in Canada, 1914-28. This first volume begins with Bland's upbringing in the home of an educated industrialist turned preacher. It goes on to explore his emergence as a liberating mind and eloquent speaker prepared to support new currents of scientific and social thought, as well as to discuss their implications for Christian faith and life. Allen concludes this first volume with Bland's departure from central Canada for the west in 1903, by which time he had become a somewhat controversial figure amongst conservative evangelicals throughout the country. More than just biography, however, The View from the Murney Tower is also an examination of progressive religion in late-Victorian Canada, a time in which Darwinism and other Biblical, social, and intellectual controversies were profoundly affecting the growth of a young nation.

This book aims to unpack the core message of the Labour Church and question the accepted views of the movement by pursuing an alternative way of analysing its history, significance and meaning. The religious influences on late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century British Socialism are examined and placed within a wider context, highlighting a continuing theological imperative for the British Labour movement. The book argues that the most distinctive feature of the Labour Church was Theological Socialism. For its founder, John Trevor, Theological Socialism was the literal Religion of Socialism, a post-Christian prophecy announcing the dawn of a new utopian era explained in terms of the Kingdom of God on earth; for members of the Labour Church, who are referred to as Theological Socialists, Theological Socialism was an inclusive message about God working through the Labour movement. Challenging the historiography and reappraising the political significance of the Labour Church, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching the intersection between religion and politics, as well as radical left history and politics more generally.

Since the 1970s Richard Allen's scholarship on the social gospel has broken new ground in the field of Canadian social and religious history by recovering key aspects of the tradition and its contribution to reform movements and politics. Beyond the Noise of Solemn Assemblies collects and extends many of his classic works to present a comprehensive overview of a major thread in the fabric of the country. Observing the mutual foundations of political and religious traditions in myth and arguing that the sacred and the secular belong together in discussions of public affairs, Allen contests the view that religion is personal and isolated from the public square. He discusses a range of topics: the transition from providential to progressive thought in nineteenth-century Canada; the new spirituality of social solidarity articulated by Winnipeg college students in the 1890s; the role of the social gospel in pioneering urban reform; farmers and workers finding in radical Christianity legitimation for political revolt; Christian intellectuals in the 1930s framing a revolutionary prospectus for Depression-era Canada; the significance of Norman Bethune's religious upbringing for his life and work; strategically focused post-war ecumenical coalitions like Project North and the Latin American Working Group; and the prospects for democratic socialism at the end of the Cold War. Opening with a chapter relating the author's upbringing in a ministerial household dedicated to the Protestant ethic as the spirit of socialism, Beyond the Noise of Solemn Assemblies represents a significant contribution to understanding the social Christian movement in Canada.

The idea of Canada as a consumer society was largely absent before 1890 but familiar by the mid-1960s. This change required more than rising incomes and greater impulses to buy; it involved the creation of new concepts. Buying Happiness explores the ways public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption and consumer behaviours. Topics include the state’s creation of the first cost-of-living index in 1914–15, the development of consumer consciousness during the Depression, and the ways in which popular magazines encouraged an ethic of cautious consumerism in the postwar period. Bettina Liverant’s fresh approach connects changes in consumer consciousness with changes in the economy and behaviour. As the figure of “the consumer” moved from the margins to the centre of social, cultural, and political analysis, the values and concepts associated with consumerism were woven into the Canadian social imagination.

Bill Blaikie has a unique insider's perspective on political life in Canada. As a United Church minister reflecting on three decades in the House of Commons, he tells the too-often-overlooked story of Canada's Christian left and, in particular, of the New Democratic Party's roots in the social gospel and its ongoing influence. This lively book is peppered with personal anecdotes, and political personalities and events from Canadas recent history. Foreword by Lloyd Axworthy, former minister of foreign affairs. Includes a colour photo insert.

"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.

This book is about preaching in The United Church of Canada. Gathering together two or three sermons from each decade in the first century of the United Church’s life, authors HyeRan Kim-Cragg and Don Schweitzer share the perspectives of diverse United Church preachers facing events from the formation of the United Church to the challenge of online ministry during a pandemic. Each sermon is accompanied by historical context, an analysis of homiletical techniques, and the influence of each sermon and preacher. From the opening chapters of Moments in Time, readers will be transported across the last century to survey the landscape and legacy of this beloved institution that has played such an influential role in Canadian religious history and society.

A crisis of faith confronted many Canadian Protestants in the late nineteenth century. With their religious beliefs challenged by the new biological sciences and historical criticism of the Bible, they turned from personal salvation to the dire social problems of the industrial age. The Regenerators explores the nature of social criticism in this era and its complex ties to the religious thinking of the day, showing how the path blazed by nineteenth-century religious liberals led not to the Kingdom of God on earth, but, ironically, to the secular city. The winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction when it was first published in 1985, The Regenerators became an instant classic for its fascinating portraits of evolutionists, rationalists, spiritualists, socialists, and free thinkers before the turn of the century. This new edition features an introduction by historian and biographer Donald Wright.

Ring Around the Maple is about the condition of children in Canada from roughly 1850 to 2000, a time during which “the modern” increasingly disrupted traditional ways. Authors Cynthia R. Comacchio and Neil Sutherland trace the lives of children over this “long century” with a view to synthesizing the rich interdisciplinary, often multi-disciplinary, literature that has emerged since the 1970s. Integrated into this synthesis is the authors’ new research into many, often seemingly disparate, archival and published primary sources. Emphasizing how “the child” and childhood are sociohistoric constructs, and employing age analytically and relationally, they discuss the constants and the variants in their historic dimensions. While childhood tangibly modernized during these years, it remained a far from universal experience due to identifiers of race, gender, culture, region, and intergenerational adaptations that characterize the process of growing up. This work highlights children’s perspectives through close, critical, “against the grain” readings of diaries, correspondence, memoirs, interviews, oral histories and autobiographies, many buried in obscure archives. It is the only extant historical discussion of Canadian children that interweaves the experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children with those of children from a number of settler groups. Ring Around the Maple makes use of photographs, catalogues, advertisements, government publications, musical recordings, radio shows, television shows, material goods, documentary and feature films, and other such visual and aural testimony. Much of this evidence has not to date been used as historical testimony to uncover the lives of ordinary children. This book is generously illustrated with photographs and ephemera carefully selected to reflect children’s lives, conditions, interests, and obligations. It will be of special interest to historians and social scientists interested in children and the culture of childhood, but will also appeal to readers who enjoy the "little stories" that together make up our collective history, especially when those are told by the children who lived them.

In The Uncomfortable Pew Bruce Douville explores the relationship between Christianity and the New Left in English Canada from 1959 to 1975. Focusing primarily on Toronto, he examines the impact that left-wing student radicalism had on Canada's largest Christian denominations, and the role that Christianity played in shaping Canada’s New Left. Based on extensive archival research and oral interviews, this study reconstructs the social and intellectual worlds of young radicals who saw themselves as part of both the church and the revolution. Douville looks at major communities of faith and action, including the Student Christian Movement, Kairos, and the Latin American Working Group, and explains what made these and other groups effective incubators for left-wing student activism. He also sheds light on Canada's Roman Catholic, Anglican, and United churches and the ways that progressive older Christians engaged with radical youth and the issues that concerned them, including the Vietnam War, anti-imperialism around the globe, women’s liberation, and gay liberation. Challenging the idea that the New Left was atheistic and secular, The Uncomfortable Pew reveals that many young activists began their careers in student Christian organizations, and these religious and social movements deeply influenced each other. While the era was one of crisis and decline for leading Canadian churches, Douville shows how Christianity retained an important measure of influence during a period of radical social change.