Modalities of Social Authority: Suggesting an Interface for Religious and Social History

The dominant approaches in Canadian social history have focused, for the most part, upon categories of region, class formation, and women's experience (more recently informed by theories of gender). Because of the priorities placed upon these "primary identities", religious experience, both in its social and personal aspects, has tended to form a "neutral" backdrop to the more active dimensions of secular political and social thought. We thus …