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The United Church of Canada has a rich and complex history of theological development. This volume, written for the general reader as well as students and scholars, provides a comprehensive overview of that development, together with an analysis of this unique denomination's core statements of faith and its contemporary theological landscape. When the Methodist, Congregational, and Local Union Churches in Canada, as well as most of the Presbyterians, came together as The United Church of Canada, the theological commonalities between them were significant.

In 1790, the French revolutionary government reformed the Catholic Church and demanded that clerics swear an oath of allegiance to the nation and its vision for French Catholicism. Although half of France's parish clergy refused to accept the state-sponsored reforms, others became embroiled in this decade-long ecclesiastical experiment. This included Jean-Baptiste Volfius, a patriot, priest, and professor who embraced the changes in France and believed in the revolution's potential to create a purer church.

During a period of great religious upheaval, Anglican philosopher and ecclesiastic Henry Longueville Mansel (1820-1871) became famous for his 1858 Bampton Lectures, which sought to defend traditional faith by employing a skeptical philosophy. Understanding Mansel and the passionate debate that surrounded his career provides insight into the current struggle for ancient religions to articulate their traditions in a modern world. In Scripture, Skepticism, and the Character of God Dane Neufeld explores the life and thought of the now forgotten nineteenth-century theologian.

Since the 1970s Richard Allen's scholarship on the social gospel has broken new ground in the field of Canadian social and religious history by recovering key aspects of the tradition and its contribution to reform movements and politics. Beyond the Noise of Solemn Assemblies collects and extends many of his classic works to present a comprehensive overview of a major thread in the fabric of the country.

In twentieth-century Canada, mainline Protestants, fundamentalists, liberal nationalists, monarchists, conservative Anglophiles, and left-wing intellectuals had one thing in common: they all subscribed to a centuries-old world view that Catholicism was an authoritarian, regressive, untrustworthy, and foreign force that did not fit into a democratic, British nation like Canada.

In the past two decades, Québec has been racked by a series of controversies in which the religiosity of migrants and minorities has been represented as a threat to the province's once staunchly Catholic, and now resolutely secular, identity. In Moments of Crises, Ian Morrison locates these debates within a longer history of crises within - and transformations of - Québécois identity, from the Conquest of New France in 1760 to contemporary times.

Over the last few decades, politicians in Europe and North America have fiercely debated the effects of a growing Muslim minority on their respective national identities. Some of these countries have prohibited Islamic religious coverings in public spaces and institutions, while in others, legal restriction remains subject to intense political conflict. Seeking to understand these different outcomes, social scientists have focused on the role of countries' historically rooted models of nationhood and their attendant discourses of secularism.

How do militants rationalize violence and what are their motives? How do time and space shape their destiny? In Violence and Militants Baris Cayli explores these enduring questions by comparing violent episodes in towns and villages in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Balkans with today's zones of conflict from Afghanistan to the Middle East. Placing history alongside the troubles of the present, Violence and Militants reveals parallels between Christian militants who rebelled against the Ottoman Empire and four jihadist organizations of today: Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Isis.

Evangelicals have been scandalized by their association with Donald Trump, their megachurches summarily dismissed as "religious Walmarts." In The Subversive Evangelical Peter Schuurman shows how a growing group of "reflexive evangelicals" use irony to critique their own tradition and distinguish themselves from the stereotype of right-wing evangelicalism.

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, "I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say." Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests.