Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Once in a while, an occasion turns out to be historic, historical, and historiographical. Such an occasion was the conference on the Canadian Evangelical Experience held at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, early in May 1995. This four-day conference devoted to the history of evangelicalism in Canada (thus “historical”) was the first of its kind in this country, and marked the emergence of a critical mass of scholarship in this field (thus “historic”). It has become a considerable enough mass, in fact, that this review will confine itself to published books and particularly those published in the last ten years. It is a “critical” mass, furthermore, in that the conference raised explicitly and implicitly serious questions about the writing of Canadian evangelical history, some of which this essay will discuss (thus “historiographical”).
1. Interested readers may also want to consult a popular, impressionistic look: Mackey, Lloyd, These Evangelical Churches of Ours (Winfield, British Columbia: Wood Lake Books, 1995).Google Scholar
2. Lindsay Reynolds recently has offered a popular history of the Christian and Missionary Alliance: Rebirth: The Redevelopment of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada, 2 vols. (Willowdale, Ontario: Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada, 1992).Google ScholarThomas William Miller has published an in-house account of Canadian Pentecostals: A History of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (Mississauga, Ontario: Full Gospel Publishing House, 1994).Google Scholar
3. On this last, see Cook, Sharon Anne, “Through Sunshine and Shadow”: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 (McGill-Queen's, 1995).Google Scholar
4. Wuthnow, Robert, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), especially chapter 6.Google Scholar
5. Noll, Mark A., The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994).Google Scholar