Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

CANADIAN WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS ISSUES

CANADIAN WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS ISSUES l 1283 Learning. Independent scholar Victoria Barnett, who analyzed the complex situation of the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany in her For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (1992) and authored Bystanders : Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (1999), works as a consultant for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Susan Nowak of Nazareth College of Rochester, New York, a Sister of St. Joseph whose work focuses largely on women’s issues in Holocaust studies, is involved in a wide range of that city’s interreligious activities. Margaret Obrecht, staff director of Church Relations at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has been an active supporter of local dialogue and is a member ex corde of the Christian Scholars Group on Jewish-Christian Relations. In the liturgical realm, Gail Ramshaw has argued for a way of interpreting the relationship of Old and New Testaments in the lectionary that does not reduce the former to mere preparation. Marcia Sachs Littell and Sharon Weissman Gutman have collaborated in editing an interfaith anthology of Liturgies on the Holocaust (1986). Jewish liturgical scholar Ruth Langer serves as the Judaica scholar at Boston College’s Center for Christian-Jewish Learning. On the educational front, much has transpired since the textbook studies of the early 1960s directed at eliminating anti-Judaism from Christian texts. A more complex undertaking has succeeded that task: establishing a deeper understanding of both traditions in relation to each other. Many Christians with educational responsibilities in the churches have engaged in continuing education programs, such as the “I Am Joseph Your Brother” program at Villanova University directed by Fayette Veverka in which experienced Catholic educators studied Judaism under the tutelage of faculty from Gratz College (a Jewish institution) and then designed curricula for their respective institutions. From 1993 through 1995, Mary C. Boys of Union Theological Seminary and a member of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, and Sara S. Lee of Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles, directed a “Catholic-Jewish Colloquium.” This involved twenty-two educational leaders from the two traditions interacting in six intensive live-in sessions. This project in “interreligious learning” led to continuing collaboration between Lee and Boys, as they explored ways Catholics and Jews might make a deep and learned commitment to their own faith traditions while also building a religiously pluralistic society. Boys built upon these educational endeavors in her two books on Jewish-Christian relations (Jewish-Christian Dialogue: One Woman’s Experience [1997] and Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian SelfUnderstanding [2000]). If in 1955 it was hard to imagine a “field” of JewishChristian relations, today it is equally difficult to envisage this field without the involvement of women. CANADIAN WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS ISSUES Tracy J. Trothen TO IDENTIFY CANADIAN women’s religious issues, one must first have some understanding of the Canadian context. Canada is both a colonized and an imperialist nation. The mere fact of including an entry with this title is indicative of a way of perceiving and defining Canadian women’s religious issues; there is no corresponding U.S. entry. As a sociocultural and economic satellite of the powerful United States, Canada follows many of its trends and lives, in part, as a colony of the United States. However, Canada also has significant power. We have asserted this power, at times, in oppressive ways including our treatment of First Nations peoples. At other times, Canada has stood firm in its inclusive social commitments, as in the case of universal health care. A survival theme has characterized much of Canadian history and emergent identity. Part of this theme has been the concept of a cultural mosaic rather than the American melting pot. In 1867, Confederation brought together the disparate cultures of French-speaking and English-speaking Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians and effectively laid the groundwork for the marginalization and exploitation of “Indians,” especially women. Canada’s commitment to peace, order, and good government, as set down by the British North America Act in 1867, was designed to promote harmonious coexistence in a heretofore tumultuous context; the “Lone Ranger was no hero here” (Legge, 36). However , simply because we claim these ideals does not mean that we are always harmonious and hospitable. Regionalism, replete with histories of abused power and damaged relationships between francophones and anglophones , First Nations peoples and white European peoples, prairie folk and easterners, farmers and urbanites , forms a...