Infidels And The Damn Churches

Download or read book Infidels and the Damn Churches written by Lynne Marks and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon from the 1880s to the First World War. Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settler women. White, working-class men often arrived in the province alone and identified the church with their exploitative employers. At the same time, BC’s anti-Asian and anti-Indigenous racism meant that their “whiteness” alone could define them as respectable, without the need for church affiliation. Consequently, although Christianity retained major social power elsewhere, many people in BC found the freedom to forgo church attendance or espouse atheist views. This nuanced study of mobility, gender, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into BC’s distinctive culture and into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.

Download or read book Infidels and the Damn Churches written by Lynne Marks and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon. Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in frontier BC, a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settlers. This nuanced study of mobility, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.

Download or read book A Constructive Critique of Religion written by Mia Lövheim and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some strategies for critique of religion seem to be more beneficial for constructive engagement, whereas others increase intolerance, polarization, and conflict? Through an analysis of the reasons underpinning a critique of religion in institutional contexts of secular democratic societies, A Constructive Critique of Religion explores how constructive interaction and critique can be developed across diverse interests. It shows how social and cultural conditions shaping these institutions enable and structure a critical and constructive engagement across diverging worldviews. A key argument running through the book is that to develop constructive forms of critique a more thorough and systematic investigation of resources for criticism located within religious worldviews themselves is needed. Chapters also address how critique of Islam and Christianity in particular is expressed in areas such as academia, the law, politics, media, education and parenting, with a focus on Northern Europe and North America. The interdisciplinary approach, which combines theoretical perspectives with empirical case studies, contributes to advancing studies of the complex and contentious character of religion in contemporary society.

Download or read book Religion at the Edge written by Paul Bramadat and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cascadia bioregion – British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon – has long been at the forefront of cultural shifts occurring throughout North America, in particular regarding religious institutions, ideas, and practices. Religion at the Edge explores the rise of religious “nones,” the decline of mainstream Christian denominations, spiritual and environmental innovation, increasing religious pluralism, and the growth of smaller, more traditional faith groups in Cascadia. This volume is the first research-driven book to address religion, spirituality, and irreligion in the Pacific Northwest, past and present. Employing surveys, archival sources, interviews, and focus groups, contributors showcase a spectrum of adherents from Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Baha’i, New Age, Indigenous, and irreligious communities. Religion at the Edge expands our understanding of contemporary society, pursuing empirical and theoretical debates about the nature, scale, and implications of socio-religious changes in North America, and the relevance of regionalism to that discussion.

Download or read book Expanding Energy written by Christopher H. Evans and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-02-07 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the seventh and final volume in the Global Story of Christianity series. The volume’s chapters, written by major scholars in the field, spotlight vital episodes and themes for understanding the historical development of Christianity in the United States and Canada. Serving as an accessible text for students and an informative volume for scholars, the book provides new insights into Christianity’s development in North America, offering fresh perspectives on topics frequently overlooked by scholars. The book situates the history of North American Christianity within broader themes associated with Christianity’s role as a global religion.

Download or read book A Liberal-Labour Lady written by Veronica Strong-Boag and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbia’s first female MLA and the British Empire’s first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith (1863–1933) demanded a fair deal for “deserving” British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in England in 1863, the daughter and wife of miners, she emigrated to Nanaimo, BC, in 1892. As she became a well-known suffragist and her husband Ralph won provincial and federal elections, the power couple strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminism’s privileging of white women. Ralph’s 1917 death launched Mary Ellen as a candidate in a tumultuous 1918 Vancouver by-election. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Mary Ellen Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canada’s compromised struggle for greater justice.

Download or read book None of the Above written by Joel Thiessen and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compares secular attitudes characterizing “religious nones” in the United States and Canada Almost a quarter of American and Canadian adults are nonreligious, while teens and young adults are even less likely to identify religiously. None of the Above explores the growing phenomenon of “religious nones” in North America. Who are the religious nones? Why, and where, is this population growing? While there has been increased attention on secularism in both Europe and the United States, little work to date has focused on Canada. Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme turn to survey and interview data to explore how a nonreligious identity impacts a variety of aspects of daily life in the US and Canada in sometimes similar and sometimes different ways, offering insights to illuminate societal and political trends. With numbers of nonreligious people even higher in Canada than in the US, some believe that secular currents to the north foreshadow what will happen in the US. None of the Above asserts that a growing divide between religious and nonreligious populations could engender a greater distance in moral and political values and behaviors. At once provocative and insightful, this book tackles questions of coexistence, religious tolerance, and spirituality, as American and Canadian society accelerate toward a more secular future.