Content area
Full Text
A Concise History of Christianity in Canada. Edited by Terrence Murphy and Roberto Perin. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 456. $27.95 paperback.)
Since the trilogy of A History of the Christian Church in Canada by Walsh, Moir, and Grant was published in the early 1970's, the specialization of Canadian history has produced new and more accurate methods of gathering information and deepening our understanding of the more sensitive issues of history. Fields such as gender, Native, religious devotion, and popular history have opened up whole new horizons which had been hidden or forgotten. Under the editorial leadership of Terrence Murphy and Roberto Perin, Oxford University Press has published a new history of Canadian Christianity. Its emphasis is centered on the people's beliefs and practices in an effort to move away from institutional history.The five historians mobilized to write the lengthy sections of this substantial volume are skilled methodologists in researching and writing contemporary history. For instance, the American Catholic Historical Association in 1995 bestowed its John Gilmary Shea Award on one of the authors, Brian Clarke, for his Piety and Nationalism: Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850-1895. And so the other authors are equally well respected and well published in their fields.
Five essays averaging seventy pages each are carefully researched and skillfully written.The authors demonstrate that five researchers writing...