The Secular Northwest
The Secular Northwest

Author: Tina Block

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2016-07-22

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0774831316

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The image of a rough frontier – where working men were tempted away from church on Sundays by more profane concerns – was perpetuated by postwar church leaders, who decried the decline of religious involvement. In this pioneering book, Tina Block debunks the myth of a godless frontier, revealing a Pacific Northwest that consciously rejected the trappings of organized religion but not necessarily spirituality – and not necessarily God. Secularism was not only the domain of the working man: women, families, and middle-class communities all helped to shape the region’s secular identity. But rejection of religion led to family, gender, and class tensions. Drawing on oral histories, census data, newspapers, and archival sources, Block explores the dynamics of Northwest secularity, grounded in the cultural permeability of the Canada–United States border, the independent spirit of those who called the region home, and their openness to secular ways of experiencing the world.

Infidels and the Damn Churches
Infidels and the Damn Churches

Author: Lynne Marks

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2017-06-09

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0774833475

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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.

Orca
Orca

Author: Jason Michael Colby

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0190673095

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Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and the author's own family history, this is the definitive story of how the feared and despised "killer" became the beloved "orca", and what that has meant for our relationship with the ocean and its creatures

Religion and the Demographic Revolution
Religion and the Demographic Revolution

Author: Callum G. Brown

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1843837927

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In the 1960s Christian religious practice and identity declined rapidly and women's lives were transformed, spawning a demographic revolution in sex, family and work. The argument of this book is that the two were intimately connected, triggered by an historic confluence of factors.

Havens in a Hectic World
Havens in a Hectic World

Author: Star Weiss

Publisher: TouchWood Editions

Published: 2008-04-01

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1926971949

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The frantic pace of our world leaves little time for reflection, and even less time to nurture our spirits. In Havens in a Hectic World, Star Weiss explores the spiritual geography of the West Coast with individuals from a wide variety of faiths and cultural traditions. In visiting their sacred places, and hearing them share their stories, Weiss raises questions about our contemporary sources of spiritual growth, our evolving ideas of the divine, and the power of place. From mountains to ancient forests to labyrinths, she takes readers on a journey of awe and wonder through both the geographic destinations, and the experiences they make possible.

Household Counts
Household Counts

Author: Peter Baskerville

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13:

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"The Canadian census taken in 1901 has surprising things to say about the family as a social grouping and cultural construct at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the nuclear-family household was the most frequent type of household, family was not a singular form or structure at all; rather, it was a fluid micro-social community through which people lived and moved. There was no one "traditional" family, but rather many types of families and households, each with its own history ... to explore the demographic context of families in Canada using the 1901 census. Split into five sections, the collection covers such topics as family demography, urban families, the young and old, family and social history, and smaller groups as well. The remarkable plasticity of family and household that Household Counts reveals is of critical importance to our understanding of nation-building in Canada. This collection not only makes an important contribution to family history, but also to the widening intellectual exploration of historical censuses."--Pub. description.

Religion at the Edge
Religion at the Edge

Author: Paul Bramadat

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2022-04-01

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0774867655

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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.

The Cambridge History of Atheism
The Cambridge History of Atheism

Author: Michael Ruse

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-16

Total Pages: 1307

ISBN-13: 1009040219

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The two-volume Cambridge History of Atheism offers an authoritative and up to date account of a subject of contemporary interest. Comprised of sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this History is comprehensive in scope. The essays are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, philosophy, sociology, and classics. Offering a global overview of the subject, from antiquity to the present, the volumes examine the phenomenon of unbelief in the context of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish societies. They explore atheism and the early modern Scientific Revolution, as well as the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and its continuing implications. The History also includes general survey essays on the impact of scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as contemporary assessments of thinking. Providing essential information on the nature and history of atheism, The Cambridge History of Atheism will be indispensable for both scholarship and teaching, at all levels.

An Unusual Relationship
An Unusual Relationship

Author: Yaakov Ariel

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2013-06-24

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0814770681

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"In this enormously well researched and gracefully argued book, Ariel develops a nuanced theme: the complexity, ambivalence, and even paradox that has characterized conservative Protestant beliefs regarding Jews and Israel, and the diverse responses among Jews. . . . First-rate scholarship presented in a pleasingly accessible style." —Stephen Spector, author of Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism It is generally accepted that Jews and evangelical Christians have little in common. Yet special alliances developed between the two groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Evangelicals viewed Jews as both the rightful heirs of Israel and as a group who failed to recognize their true savior. Consequently, they set out to influence the course of Jewish life by attempting to evangelize Jews and to facilitate their return to Palestine. Their double-edged perception caused unprecedented political, cultural, and theological meeting points that have revolutionized Christian-Jewish relationships. An Unusual Relationship explores the beliefs and political agendas that evangelicals have created in order to affect the future of the Jews. This volume offers a fascinating, comprehensive analysis of the roots, manifestations, and consequences of evangelical interest in the Jews, and the alternatives they provide to conventional historical Christian-Jewish interactions. It also provides a compelling understanding of Middle Eastern politics through a new lens. Yaakov Ariel is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book, Evangelizing the Chosen People, was awarded the Albert C. Outler prize by the American Society of Church History. In the Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History

A House Full of Females
A House Full of Females

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2017-01-10

Total Pages: 525

ISBN-13: 1101947977

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From the author of A Midwife's Tale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for History, and The Age of Homespun--a revelatory, nuanced, and deeply intimate look at the world of early Mormon women whose seemingly ordinary lives belied an astonishingly revolutionary spirit, drive, and determination. A stunning and sure-to-be controversial book that pieces together, through more than two dozen nineteenth-century diaries, letters, albums, minute-books, and quilts left by first-generation Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, the never-before-told story of the earliest days of the women of Mormon "plural marriage," whose right to vote in the state of Utah was given to them by a Mormon-dominated legislature as an outgrowth of polygamy in 1870, fifty years ahead of the vote nationally ratified by Congress, and who became political actors in spite of, or because of, their marital arrangements. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing of this small group of Mormon women who've previously been seen as mere names and dates, has brilliantly reconstructed these textured, complex lives to give us a fulsome portrait of who these women were and of their "sex radicalism"--the idea that a woman should choose when and with whom to bear children.