An extremely interesting work of imperial history by Christopher
Hodson (BYU) involving an understudied episode in Canadian religious history, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth Century History (OUP 2012). The publisher’s description follows.
Late in 1755, an army of British regulars and Massachusetts volunteers completed one of the cruelest, most successful military campaigns in North American history, capturing and deporting seven thousand French-speaking Catholic Acadians from the province of Nova Scotia, and chasing an equal number into the wilderness of eastern Canada. Thousands of Acadians endured three decades of forced migrations and failed settlements that shuttled them to the coasts of South America, the plantations of the Caribbean, the frigid islands of the South Atlantic, the swamps of Louisiana, and the countryside of central France.
The Acadian Diaspora tells their extraordinary story in full for the first time, illuminating a long-forgotten world of imperial desperation, experimental colonies, and naked brutality. Using documents culled from archives in France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, Christopher Hodson reconstructs the lives of Acadian exiles as they traversed oceans and continents, pushed along by empires eager to populate new frontiers with inexpensive, pliable white farmers. Hodson’s compelling narrative situates the Acadian diaspora within the dramatic geopolitical changes triggered by the Seven Years’ War. Faced with redrawn boundaries and staggering national debts, imperial architects across Europe used the Acadians to realize radical plans: tropical settlements without slaves, expeditions to the unknown southern continent, and, perhaps strangest of all, agricultural colonies within old regime France itself. In response, Acadians embraced their status as human commodities, using intimidation and even violence to tailor their communities to the superheated Atlantic market for cheap, mobile labor.
Through vivid, intimate stories of Acadian exiles and the diverse, transnational cast of characters that surrounded them, The Acadian Diaspora presents the eighteenth-century Atlantic world from a new angle, challenging old assumptions about uprooted peoples and the very nature of early modern empire.
Next month Fernwood Publishing will publish Religion, Sex, and Politics: Christian Churches and Same-Sex Marriage in Canada by Pamela Dickey Young (Queen’s University). The publisher’s description follows.
Proposed Christian Law School in Canada: A Response
A couple of days ago, I posted about the controversy surrounding a proposed new Christian law school in Canada. I questioned whether it’s a good idea to found a new law school in the current environment and wondered whether Canadian law would allow the proposed school, at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, to require its students, faculty and staff to adhere to traditional Christian sexual ethics. Over at First Thoughts, Dr. Janet Epp-Buckingham, a professor at Trinity Western and member of the group that developed the proposal for the new school, objected to some elements of my post, and I offered her the chance to respond more fully. Janet’s response follows below:
Mark Movsesian wrote a blog on January 22 questioning the wisdom of trying to start a law school at Trinity Western University. The university has a 50 year history and is located in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. Mark based some of his concerns on the downturn for lawyers and law schools in the U.S. While legal education has had its issues in the last few years in Canada, the situation is much different in Canada than in the U.S. Actually, the whole university structure is much different, and more regulated, in Canada.
Trinity Western is the largest of only a handful of Christian universities in Canada. There are very few private universities. Most universities are public universities and subsidized by provincial governments. Before a new program can start at any university, public or private, it must be approved Continue reading →
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Posted in Commentary, Mark L. Movsesian
Tagged Canada, Comparative Law and Religion, Legal Education