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My blog posts revolve around my interests and vocation as a historian: the intersection of history and contemporary church life, the intersection of history and contemporary politics, serendipitous discoveries in archives or on research trips, publications and research projects, upcoming conferences, and speaking engagements. I also blog for two other organizations, the Canadian Baptist Historical Society and the Centre for Post-Christendom Studies. The views expressed in these blogs represent the views of the authors, and not necessarily those of any organizations with which they are associated. |
 If you think today’s media is wildly biased, spewing vitriolic commentary, and destroying the fabric of the nation, you need to read up on early twentieth-century reporting during wartime Canada. It was so bad that one commentator wrote: “This prostitution of a great privilege…is the darkening curse of Canadian journalism.”
The issue then was support for the nation’s war effort. It was a hostile binary world of French (Catholic) versus English (Protestant), and the tensions – stoked by the irresponsible and partisan media – turned to violence as rioters took to the streets in Quebec. With the US in the midst of an election, and Canada teetering on one, there is wisdom be gained by looking back to a time when the media had run amok and was tearing the nation apart.
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 Image of Pelagius taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pelagius_from_Nuremberg_Chronicle.jpg The history of Christian theological debate is far from stellar. Accounts of violence are endemic, marring the witness of the church. For those today mired in theological disputes, there is one brief description in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History(731) that is a pithy helpful reminder of what to do (or not to do) when passions over doctrine are running high.
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