 Note from Editor Note from the Editor
by Olga Stein
This issue will be my last issue in the position of chief editor of Books in Canada. It has been an experience for which I am deeply grateful.
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| Book Review Munificient Women
by Belinda Beaton
A few months ago, students at the University of Toronto demanded to know the terms of a major benefactor's gift to the business school; they believed that he had been granted too much recognition along with unprecedented control over academic matters.
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| Book Review Magic vs. Islam
by Gerald Owen
Surely, I thought, not even Napoleon III would be so goofy as to send a magician to North Africa to overawe the Arabs? But after my first reading, I learned that the Henri Lambert of this novel is based on Robert Houdin.
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| Book Review Mortal Jumper
by Alan Arkush
In an age as rife with nihilism as our own, one might expect that Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi would be something of a household name in educated circles.
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| Book Review Glosses on a Gay Prophet
by Keith Garebian
Tony Kushner's Angels in America is the most outstanding work of modern American play-writing in the last two or three decades.
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| Book Review The Importance of Aristotle's Physics
by Arthur Melzer
While the Martian rover, the latest wonder child of modern science and technology, has been toddling about the surface of Mars, back here on earth a Professor David Bolotin of Saint John's College.
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| Book Review Hogtown & Jerusalem
by Eric Ormsby
This lusty, shambling, terse, and magniloquent book contains "the whole Hogg", the poems as well as the drawings, but it is no mere re-issue of the 1978 collection of virtually the same title.
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| Book Review Alchemist with Dutch Cleanser
by Kenneth Sherman
P.K. Page is a visionary, a descendant of Blake and the alchemist writers. She makes this connection herself in "Request to the Alchemist"
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
Richler's Mother. I read Scott Disher's account of Mordecai Richler's career (November) agreeing with some of what he wrote, disagreeing with much. But one remark went way beyond critical analysis,
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| Essays The Religion Question
Norman Dodge asks it, in three ways Confident critiques of religion by major intellectuals launched our century. Yet these were not refutations, but merely critiques.
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Hilary Armstrong
To be asked what must necessarily be a large and vague question about "religion", made more difficult by further questions about its future in the twenty-first century,
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Ivor Shapiro
Question 1: I have no idea. A bold historian, competent astrologer, or prophet of a certain kind may feel in a position to hazard a guess.
Question 2: See Answer #1.
Question 3: D
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - William Mathie
About a century and a half ago Alexis de Tocqueville rebuked his European readers for treating the apparently flourishing religious life of American democracy as an unnecessary relic
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - David Helwig
The future of religion? Well, we have heard about the falling away of church attendance, how those who do go are mostly old, though we are told that the church is growing in Russia, a reaction
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Thomas Langan
That powerful symbol, "religion", is being put to effective use in a cultural war transforming North American society. The game of "secular humanists" is to claim that others perpetrate those
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Emil Fackenheim
In May 1996, the University of Oregon in Eugene sponsored a four-day seminar entitled "Ethics after the Holocaust"; it was so widely attended that some had to be turned away. In September 1997
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Sharon Butala
Judging by the emptying of the traditional churches and the increase in size of bookstore sections on Nature and the environment, Native studies, "New Age" subjects, and feminist theology,
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Barry Cooper
The great revival has already begun. It promises to continue without let-up until well into the twenty-first century. It is a religious revival in the strictest sense. As George Grant pointed
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Susan Palmer
If there is one thing I have learned over the past fifteen years of studying new religious movements, it is the folly of attempting to predict their futures. I leave that risky exercise
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Robin Metcalfe
I used to be a devout atheist. Non-belief was the first radical cause to which I attached myself, and served as the type for my subsequent political activism. I learned the power of dissent at the age of nine when, alone out of four hundred students,
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Victor Shepherd
I think so. Mainline liberal Christianity is declining rapidly. Having joined itself naively to the spirit of one era, it found itself bereft in the next. Theological liberalism assumed the world's self-understanding to be true, and therefore adopted it
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - George Elliott Clarke
In memory of Hardial Bains (1939-1997) It is necessary to crucify George Grant, as we must, to expunge his fetid prejudices, his obnoxious pronouncements, his rank caterwauling in the midst of our gaudy, unutterably wasteful markets. His words
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Stan Persky
a) Will the twenty-first century be an age of religious revival? I certainly hope not, since religious revivals almost invariably signal an increase in mass stupidity, violence, and the oppression of those unwilling to pray in the end-zone to whatever
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Dennis Duffy
Excerpt from A Whole Lot More of Jesus and Lot Less Rock and Roll: Christian Militancy and Millennial Conflict (Trucross Press, 2063). The New World Order's (NWO) reaction to the Pan-Islamic capture of Tel Aviv in 2008 and the subsequent
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - David Homel
The current upsurge in spiritual activity is actually one of commercial activity. Right now, spirituality sells. Prime linear footage in the big chain stores is being occupied these days by writers who see shamans as often as they do grain elevators-every
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Louis Greenspan
In 1897, respondents to a symposium such as this one would have agreed, however reluctantly, that the twentieth century would be a post-religious age. The evidence favoured Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God, Laplace's announcement that we don't
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Gregory Baum
Following Auguste Comte, many sociologists believed in the theory of secularization. They argued that industrialization and the dominance of instrumental reason would inevitably lead to the waning of religion. If religion survived, they thought, it would
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - T. F. Rigelhof
Religions come, religions go but religion in some form or another is almost always with us. Religion is one of the near-universals of social behaviour and this is not about to change
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Iain Benson
From the vantage-point of the late twentieth century, there is a certain irony in being invited to consider whether there will be a rise in religion in the twenty-first Century.
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Janette Turner Hospital
Suddenly I notice the words "spiritual" and "spirituality" all over the place. They are, it would seem, expressions of a yearning for which the speakers find inadequate the connotations
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Mary Jo Leddy
I have a few hunches about the revival of religion in this millennial period of time. Some of them I hope will be proven wrong.
Let me declare at the outset a belief, a conviction, or what some would call a bias. I believe that we human beings are
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Patrick O'Flaherty
A religious revival is a movement or series of meetings "to reawaken faith". So says my dictionary. The word "revival" presupposes the continuance of faith. But will faith itself endure? Will it survive the assaults that have been mounted against it by
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Suzanne Scorsone
The question of religious revivals in the twenty-first century could be addressed briefly enough. There will be revivals in the twenty-first century as there have been in every other century about which we have knowledge. They will take many forms, and
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Keath Fraser
I am going to be graceless. To even a lazy reader, much less an agnostic one, these three questions seem so received as to be meaningless. Why should a magazine devoted to books in Canada
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - David Atkinson
One frequently hears that religion in North America is no longer a major factor in the lives of many people, and that religion is increasingly less influential in determining the moral
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Kenneth Hart Green
1. I believe a religious revival is likely-but not for everyone, and not in forms likely to please everyone. As the quasi-political faiths, which are actually surrogate religions,
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Charles Levin
The prospects for many religions seem very bright indeed, particularly outside of Western Europe and North America. For example, Christianity is booming around the equator,
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Sam Ajzenstat
"Disestablish the church?" asked the English bureaucrat Charles Buller a century ago and answered, "Never! It's the only thing between us and religion." Buller's statement suggests how
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Sheila Grant
It seems impossible to answer these questions without first trying to define what religion is. If it is used to mean feelings of spirituality, and the creation of one's own values,
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| Essays The Religion Question Answered - Joan Thomas
My only qualification for expounding on the future of religion is that I survived a very religious childhood. This gives me a felt-in-the-bones connection to the subject, although in point
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| Essays A Concluding Unscientific Postscript - a response to the responses
Graham Greene once said to Evelyn Waugh that his next novel wouldn't be about God, for a change. Waugh told him he was making a mistake: it would be as if P. G. Wodehouse were to drop Jeeves half way through the Bertie Wooster series.
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| Essays A Guide of the Perplexed - a discussion of our symposium
As Special Projects Editor for Books in Canada, I have played a large part in putting together this special edition, and I thought it might be of interest to our readers to learn how we conducted our survey.
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| First Novels First Novels - Three Small Towns
by Eva Tihanyi
The Projectionist (Douglas & McIntyre, 299 pages, $18.99 trade paperback), by Michael Helm, one of the nominees for the prestigious Giller Prize, is a hard book not to fence-sit about. Although the writing is assured,
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| First Novels First Novels - Three Small Towns
by Eva Tihanyi
Much more intimate in its approach is Michael Thoma's accomplished debut, Gibson's Landing (Terra Bella Publishers, 306 pages, $14.95 trade paperback). This is not only the author's first foray into fiction, but his publisher's as well-and
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| First Novels First Novels - Three Small Towns
by Eva Tihanyi
After the relatively "normal" fictional worlds of Helm and Thoma, the realm visited by Tony Burgess in The Hell Mouths of Bewdley (ECW Press, 180 pages, $12 trade paperback) comes as a dark surprise. Bewdley, Ontario, population 510
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by M D
There are a lot of historical Jesuses these days. According to the editors of this rich collection of thought-provoking and at times amusing essays, the last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented boom in historical Jesus research, producing
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by M D
This book is a guide to "sacred places" throughout the world. The places in question are not, as one might at first assume, traditional religious sites, but are instead either natural wonders or primitive shrines (e.g., Stonehenge). The book combines
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by M D
Brian Stiller is playing with fire. The Canada of today, according to Stiller, is a "Tower of Babel", fragmented not only by language but by geography, religious disputes, liberalism, and so on. This fragmentation has permitted the triumph of one
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by M D
It is becoming commonly accepted nowadays that recent discoveries in modern natural science suggest that science is not incompatible with mysticism. In The Quest for the Fourth Monkey, Sylvia Fraser, who always seems to have her finger
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by M D
In her introduction, by way of justifying this new biography of St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, Patricia Simpson writes that "each age puts its own questions to the past and does so in its own idiom. [Previous biographers of Marguerite] wrote in the
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by M D
According to Tom Harpur there is a "vast spiritual search going on at the moment", a search which, while not wanting to abandon reason, nevertheless reflects a deep need to believe in God. As his subtitle implies, Harpur aims in Would You Believe?
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Gerald Owen
Religion is an embarrassing topic to many: some think it too private and sensitive, others think it's like an unseemly disorder of the innards. Since the public schools avoid this awkward subject, religious parents often believe that their conviction
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Inventor Of...
by Douglas Fetherling
Every few years I like to check in with the University of Toronto Press to see how one of the great megaprojects in the history of Canadian publishing is coming along. I refer to the Collected Works of Erasmus. The decision to make new and
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