Publications in Other Languages

RELIGION 447 men are treated in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, volume x, for 1871-80 (University of Toronto Press and Les Presses de I'universite Laval 1972, xxix, 823, $20.00) . Kai Nielsen, of Calgary, has written on agnosticism; Michael E. Marmura, of the University of Toronto, on causality in Islamic thought; and I on the concept of the holy or sacred, for the Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener (Wiley / Scribner's, 4 vols., $160.00). And brief articles on a wide variety of topics by evangelical Protestants appear in Carl F.H. Henry, editor, Baker's Dictionary ofChristian Ethics (G.R. Welch / Baker, xxv, 726, $16.95), numbering among its contributors Paul Garnet and Peter Richardson (Loyola, Montreal), Roland K. Harrison , Leslie Hunt, Jakob Joez, and Richard N. Longenecker (Wycliffe, Toronto), c.T. McIntire, James H . Olthuis, and Calvin G. Seerfeld (Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto), William Fitch and Gerald Vandezande (Toronto) , W. Stanford Reid and Merville O. Vincent (Guelph), John H. Redekop (Wilfrid Laurier), Kenneth Hamilton (Winnipeg), and W. Ward Gasque and William J. Martin (Regent College, Vancouver). What judgments can one make of Canadian religion writing in 1973 as a whole? At first I thought the list skimpier than the previous year's and therefore evidence of a decline, but additional titles came to my notice. Still, one hears gloomy prognoses about the grim economic future of academic publishing. A number of the books, including some published overseas, acknowledged grants from the Humanities Research Council; were anything to happen to reduce such subventions, a decline in the quantity of serious works in the religion field would almost certainly ensue. But we look forward hopefully to a good harvest in 1974, and I shall welcome word of missed 1973 titles that should be picked up in next year's review. (WILLARD G. OXTOBY) PUBLICATIONS IN OTHER LANGUAGES Two of the three volumes of Ilya Kiryak's Syny zemU (Sons of the Soil) were republished in second editions last year by Trident Press (Winnipeg, r, 391 pp; II, 359 pp). The work as a whole, which is an epic of the pioneering life of the first Ukrainian settlers in western Canada ( northern Alberta, to be precise) , was dealt with in the University of Toronto Quarterly some two decades ago, but not to the extent it really deserved. Its reappearance on the market, therefore, provides an opportunity at 448 LE"ITERS IN CANADA least to remind those interested in the early Rowering of the Canadian west that this voluminous book is again partly available for informative reading and research. It is not necessary to dwell at too great a length On the contents of this narrative, as the harsh vicissitudes of the first immigrants to Canada, regardless of their nationalities, are only too well known through many other sources in these pages in previous years. Compared with them, however, Sons of the Soil is much more extensive in action, dialogue, and descriptions of manners and customs brought by the newcomers to this land from the old country. Excessive verbiage is perhaps the greatest fault of this otherwise profound psychological study of a people whom Kiryak makes as loquacious as they are assiduous in transforming their regions of Canada into wide tracts of fertile land at the price of intense and ceaseless toil. The author is a master in depicting the stresses and emotions of his compatriots as they strenuously seek to establish themselves firmly in the country they adopted for their brighter material and spiritual future as well as for that of their descendants. Often his detailed depiction of their exertion reaches a high pitch of pathos, as for example when the first death occurs in their new settlement. This is the highlight of the first volume, and one cannot but wonder at the author's realistic description of how the community, in its dire need, goes about collecting boards from near and far in order to nail together a box in which the deceased can be placed and given as decent a burial as the deplorable circumstances will allow. The place of interment, as was often the...