Scott McLaren

When American Methodist preachers first arrived in Upper Canada they brought more than a contagious religious faith. They also brought saddlebags stuffed with books published by the New York Methodist Book Concern – North America’s first denominational publisher – to sell along their preaching circuits. Pulpit, Press, and Politics traces the expansion of this remarkable transnational market from its earliest days to the mid-nineteenth century during a period of intense religious struggle in Upper Canada marked by fiery revivals, political betrayals, and bitter church schisms.

The Methodist Book Concern occupied a central place in all this conflict as it powerfully shaped and subverted the religious and political identities of Canadian Methodists, bankrolled the bulk of Methodist preaching and missionary activities, enabled and constrained evangelistic efforts among the colony’s Native groups, and clouded Methodist dealings with the British Wesleyans and other religious competitors north of the border. Even more importantly, as Methodists went on to assume a preeminent place in the province’s religious, cultural, and educational life, their ongoing reliance on the Methodist Book Concern played a crucial part in opening the way for what would later become the lasting acceptance and widespread use of American books and periodicals across the province as a whole.

When John Wesley died in 1791, everyone knew that his official biography would be a bestseller. But early confusion over whom Wesley intended to safeguard his property and take possession of his personal papers led to a protracted struggle over who ought to have the sanctioned right to interpret Wesley’s long life to the wider reading public. This paper argues that as the dispute over Wesley’s biography intensified among his followers, the themes and language that emerged helped to prepare the ground for later conflicts and schisms between preachers and people that would define Methodist history for decades to come.

When Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Education and Upper Canada’s most famous Methodist preacher, wrote to defend a clause in the 1846 Common School Act banning the use of American textbooks, he pulled out all the stops. Not only were such books “anti-British, in every sense of the word,” they were a threat to the colony’s very survival. “[I]n precisely those parts of Upper Canada where the United States School Books had been used most extensively,” he railed, “there the spirit of insurrection in 1837 and 1838, was most prevalent.” While Ryerson thundered in public, however, his fellow preachers quietly went about their usual business of filling the shelves of the colony’s burgeoning Sunday school libraries with books imported in bulk from the United States. Although historians have tended to take Ryerson’s public censure of American schoolbooks at face value, this paper argues that his views were more complicated and can only be fully understood in the context of Methodist efforts to establish Sunday school libraries across the colony in the preceding decades. More than just early sites for the promotion of basic literacy and sectarianism, these denominational libraries functioned as vibrant transnational spaces where Canadian Methodists developed an experienced and complex understanding of a wider North American market for schoolbooks and juvenile literature. Although at times constrained by political necessity, Ryerson soon recuperated this broader understanding of the market to develop policies in the early 1850s that not only eschewed his earlier anti-American rhetoric, but also led to the pervasive adoption of American schoolbooks in Upper Canada’s emergent common school and public libraries.

This paper argues that the distribution of American Methodist periodicals throughout Upper Canada after the War of 1812 had a profound influence on the evolution of Methodist religious identity north of the border. While they helped to foster the denomination’s remarkable postwar recovery, these periodicals also served to reinvigorate languishing transnational ties binding Canadian and American Methodists together at a time when anti-Americanism was on the rise. As Canadians and Americans read about Methodism’s advances on both side of the border, and as Canadians patterned the growth of Sunday schools and other missionary activities on American models, the linkages uniting North American Methodists into a single imagined community of readers only strengthened. The sustained distribution of these periodicals also did much to prepare the ground for the later introduction of Canadian Methodism’s own denominational weekly, the Christian Guardian, in 1829.

This paper considers the hermetic objects that are at the centre of three of Charles Williams's early novels: War in Heaven (1930), Many Dimensions (1931), and the Greater Trumps (1932).  It argues that Williams used these objects as more than furniture around which to build compelling narratives, but as material artifacts imbued with mystical and magical properties to illustrate his own deeply held Christian belief about the fundamental relationship that exists between goodness and mere being itself.

While writers of modern vampire tales frequently discard many elements of traditional folklore, Joss Whedon demonstrated a remarkably consistent reluctance to follow a similar course in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its successful spin-off Angel. Some critics have suggested, however, that Whedon's reliance on folkloric antecedents resulted in two distinct but fundamentally irreconcilable portrayals of the human soul as both a metaphor for human moral agency and as the reified seat of individual identity and conscience. This paper argues by contrast that the ongoing tension between these two representations—one existential and the other ontological—opened the way for Whedon and his writers explore questions about human identity from inexact and shifting moral perspectives that were unusually nuanced.