McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion

Consulting a range of sources, including formerly classified papers in the Vatican archive, Contesting Zion examines relationships among the Vatican, Zionism, and American Catholics from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 through the creation of Israel in 1948 and the years that followed.

Tradition and Tension is the history of a period that marked a dramatic change in the Presbyterian Church’s fortunes – from confident expansion in the immediate postwar period to a relatively sudden contraction in the early 1960s, followed by waning membership and influence into the 1980s.

Apparition Fever examines a series of Marian apparitions that swept over Belgium in the 1930s and ’40s, tracing how knowledge of the apparitions was formed among bystanders, medical experts, and church authorities as they decided if the visionaries were worthy of belief.

In Finding Molly Johnson, Mark McGowan traces what happened to the many orphaned children who fled Ireland's Great Famine and made the long voyage to Canada. Most were not considered members of their placement families, but rather sources of cheap labour. The book revisits an important chapter of the Irish emigrant experience, revealing that the story of Canada’s acceptance of the famine orphans is a product of national myth-making.

A century ago Canada was considered to be a Christian nation and the vast majority of Canadians claimed they were devoutly religious. But some vigorously resisted the dominance of Christianity. Towards a Godless Dominion explores both anti-religious activism and the organized opposition religious unbelievers faced from Canada in the 1920s and ’30s.

A People’s Reformation offers a reinterpretation of the English Reformation and the roots of the Church of England. Drawing on archival research, Lucy Kaufman argues that England became a Protestant nation not in spite of its people, but because of them – through their active social, political, and religious participation.

By charting nearly a century of growth, struggle, and organizing, Disciples of Antigonish chronicles how a small Nova Scotian diocese came to exert tremendous influence over the development of Canadian Catholicism, and create one of the most important Catholic social movements in North America.

Religion is fundamental to contemporary Puerto Rican society. The first synthesis of the religious history of the island, Communities of the Soul explores religion in Puerto Rico and the beliefs, practices, and religious diversity of its past and present – from the cosmology of the indigenous Taíno to Afro-Caribbean and colonial influences.

Berruyer's Bible offers a fresh perspective on the history of the Catholic Enlightenment. By exploring the rise and fall of the French Jesuit Isaac-Joseph Berruyer's Histoire du peuple de Dieu, Daniel Watkins reveals how Catholic attempts to assimilate Enlightenment ideas caused conflicts within the church and between the church and the French state.

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.

How two generations of preachers and parishioners created and sustained a religious tradition.