Rage and Resistance

A Theological Reflection on the Montreal Massacre

Publication Year: 2006

On December 6, 1989, a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle entered an engineering school in Montreal and murdered fourteen women before killing himself. Responses to what has come to be known as “The Montreal Massacre” varied, from the initial shock and mourning and efforts to “make sense” of the tragedy to an outpouring of writing, art, conferences, and political lobbying. Rage and Resistance: A Theological Reflection on the Montreal Massacre examines, from a theological perspective, how the massacre was “taken up” by the media, experts, politicians, and a variety of individuals and groups. A practical exercise in Canadian contextual theology, Rage and Resistance analyzes responses to a tragic historical event by engaging with the work of theologian Gregory Baum and sociologist Dorothy Smith. Baum articulates the theological imperative to address the context in which our lives are embedded, calling for critical social analysis in order to understand, and possibly convert, social evil; Smith takes the standpoint of women as a determinate position from which society may be known. If one of the tasks of theology is to articulate and clarify the struggles in which we are engaged—to name our reality, both the forces that oppress and the possibilities for resistance and healing—this book takes on that task by focusing on an event indelibly etched into the minds of many Canadians. It analyzes some of the artistic, memorializing, and activist responses as manifestations of a spirituality of resistance and urges ever greater resistance to violence against women.

Published by: Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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Title Page, Copyright

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Preface

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pp. vii-ix

This is a travelogue. It charts the course of my journey into a foreign country. Strangely enough, that foreign country is the one I know most intimately, the one that I call home: Canada. Why foreign, then? Because in 1989, in December, the country I thought I knew changed. I realize now that it was not so much that Canada changed but that I did, as I began ...

Introduction: Roughing It in the Bush

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pp. 1-8

Look out your window. The world you see laid out before you is so very different from the one that greeted our immigrant ancestors. Generations ago, Susanna Moodie looked out her window onto a harsh and lonely wilderness. The woman who had left England in 1832 for the backwoods of Upper Canada shared the plight of many immigrants, her hopes quickly ...

1: Mapping a Way Through

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pp. 9-28

Susanna Moodie looked out onto an often hostile landscape. Her survival depended in part on learning to understand the land and sky. What did the blackening clouds foretell? What lay hidden beneath the feet and feet of snow? “The problem of the explorer or the settler is an epistemological one, a puzzling out of the ways by which we can know the reality that ...

2: How Does It Happen to Us as It Does?

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pp. 29-58

December, 1989. In Maclean’s it read like this: “For 20 horrific minutes last week, a quiet young man named Marc Lépine stalked female students in a Montreal university engineering school—killing 14 of them before turning his rifle on himself. It was Canada’s worst mass murder—and among the worst in North American history. And it set off a national wave ...

3: The Stubborn Particulars of Grace

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pp. 59-75

Grace? How so? The term is often used to refer to those moments when one is immersed in awe at the wondrous beauty that life is. There has been nothing thus far in this discussion of the Montreal Massacre to elicit such a response, nor will there be. However, both Gregory Baum and Bronwen Wallace, whose book of poetry provides the title for this chapter, ...

4: What Shall We Tell Our Bright and Shining Daughters?

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pp. 76-99

I remember that night, more clearly than I remember Wednesday night two weeks ago. The news was on in the other room. I heard something indistinct about shootings and stretchers and went to see what had happened. There were women shot, the numbers still mounting, at a university in Montreal. No, it can’t be. Not in this country; not at a university; not so many; not all women. ...

Conclusion: Look Again

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pp. 100-106

A journey motif and cartography—an attempt to map a way through the entanglement of responses to the Montreal Massacre—have been themes throughout this work. Susanna Moodie provides a model. Moodie met this country bravely; she struggled with cold and loss and want, but did not shrink from the challenge of making a home in an unfriendly, at times ...

E-ISBN-13: 9780889205338
Print-ISBN-13: 9780889205222
Print-ISBN-10: 0889205221

Page Count: 160
Publication Year: 2006

Series Title: Studies in Women and Religion