In my favorite scene from the Hollywood blockbuster movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg, 1989), the title character, a swashbuckling treasure hunter who supports himself by slumming it with an academic job in the Ivy League, insists to his class of sleepy undergraduates that "90% of an archaeologist's time is spent in the library. Myths can only be taken at face value. We do not follow maps to buried treasures, and X never ever marks the spot." In the end, of course, it is precisely this assumption that he must discard in order to gain the advantage. Speaking as a student of church history, one sensitive to the critical turn in place-name studies and taking cues from an emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry called cognitive toponymy, in this short paper I would like to begin to describe how, like Indy's intrepid character in the film, I have come to an appreciation that, just occasionally, X does, in fact, mark the spot. 1 My conclusions are preliminary and tentative, and much research remains to be done into what I term here imperial hagiotoponymy, the naming of places in settler colonies for saints. However, through an exploration of Victorian High Church devotion to St. Alban the Martyr, his name, attributes, and emblem, and by tracing the network between the first three Anglican dedications to his patronage in Canada across two important dioceses, the outlines of a previously invisible Imperialist cult begin to emerge. 2
The unprecedented participation by two Ojibwe-speaking Anishinabek lay delegates in the 1866 meeting of the Electoral Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto garnered a brief flurry of contemporary journalistic coverage across a networked imperial and colonial press. In the most vivid reportage, the two delegates were dehumanized, reduced to the status of ‘Indian nags … becoming inoculated with the ways of Anglicans’. In another more distantly circulated representation, an Indigenous presence at the incipience of Canadian synodality was invested with different rhetorical significance, the unsettling scandal of their voting membership justifying the struggle for self-government in the nascent Anglican Churches of other colonies, thus laying bare anxieties about the precarious situation of colonial Anglicanism. Rather than presuming to interpret the experience and discourse of Indigenous Anglicans, nor simply documenting the first local episode of formal Indigenous involvement in the counsels of Anglicans in Canada, this paper introduces the Electoral Synod, the neglected texts that covered the event, along with the lives of the exoticized churchmen featured in their coverage.
Two young teachers posted at an Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, Canada, sought to act as whistleblowers regarding abuse there in 1952–53. Theologian Eugene R. Fairweather of Trinity College, Toronto, acted as their advocate and spiritual advisor. A significant correspondence, mostly purged from the official record, considered the reports of the whistleblowers, their fate, and the fraught place of the Residential Schools in Canadian Anglicanism in the decades before the era of Truth and Reconciliation. This article examines the relevant correspondence, retained only in the archival remains of Fairweather at Trinity. The correspondence, which adds to existing narratives of Anglican complicity in and responses to abuse at the Schools, suggests that future research must scrutinize official as well as previously overlooked sources of information, particularly the archival repositories of universities and theological schools, in search of the truth.
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