3 minute read
Canadian history / 9, 32, 33, 34, 41, 43, 44, 45
Water from Dragon’s Well
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david kim-cragg
How Korean Christianity transformed Canadian church missionaries.
A Canadian-built mission house in the heart of Seoul became the heart of the emerging South Korean democratization movement, while a Korean minister rose to serve as the spiritual leader of Canada’s largest Protestant denomination. The century-long Korean-Canadian church relationship has had a lasting influence on Korean society and on the culture and mission of the United Church of Canada, helping to crack the colonial foundations of Canadian Protestantism.
Water from Dragon’s Well explores the connection between the Korean Christian community and the Canadian church and its missionaries from the 1890s to the present. Upon the arrival of Canadian missionaries, Korean Christian churches were already voicing nationalist aspirations; by the mid-twentieth century, they were demanding independence from Canadian missionary oversight and were participating in a wider democratic movement within South Korea. David Kim-Cragg traces indigenous churches’ resistance to decades of missionary paternalism and the ways they channelled their religious and political energies. Accepting the criticism of its hosts, the United Church of Canada helped build an independent Korean Christian church and, in 1974, ended its Korean mission. This shift in the Canadian missionaries’ colonial attitudes also contributed to the transformation of the United Church of Canada back home. With the help of Korean leadership in Canada, the church reconstructed its vision of non-Western Christianity and, in a watershed moment, established an ethnic ministry council.
Situated within ongoing conversations about the legacies of colonization and racism, Water from Dragon’s Well shows how wellsprings of religion and politics from Korea challenged and transformed white Canadian attitudes and institutions.
David Kim-Cragg is lecturer at Emmanuel College at the University of Toronto. In June 1949 the Soviet state arrested seven farmers from the village of Bila Tserkva. Not wealthy or powerful, the men were unknown outside their community, and few had ever heard of their small, isolated village on the southwestern border of Soviet Ukraine. Nevertheless, the state decided they were dangerous traitors who threatened to undermine public order, and a regional court sentenced them to twenty-five years of imprisonment for treason.
In To Make a Village Soviet Emily Baran explores why a powerful state singled out these individuals for removal from society. Bila Tserkva had to become a space in which Soviet laws and institutions reigned supreme, yet Sovietization was an aspiration as much it was a reality. The arrested men belonged to a small and misunderstood religious minority, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and both Witnesses and their neighbours challenged the government’s attempts to fully integrate the village into socialist society. Drawing from the case file and interviews with the families of survivors, Baran argues that what happened in Bila Tserkva demonstrates the sheer ambition of the state’s plans for the Sovietization of borderland communities.
A compelling history, To Make a Village Soviet looks to Bila Tserkva to explore the power and the limits of state control – and the possibilities created by communities that resist assimilation.
Emily B. Baran is associate professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University.
SPECIFICATIONS McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion June 2022 978-0-2280-1085-2 $37.95A, £27.50 paper 978-0-2280-1084-5 $130.00S, £95.00 cloth 6 × 9 336pp 22 photos, 2 tables eBook available
To Make a Village Soviet
Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Transformation of a Postwar Ukrainian Borderland
emily b. baran
How the arrival of Soviet power transformed the lives of citizens in the Ukrainian borderlands.
SPECIFICATIONS McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion August 2022 978-0-2280-1055-5 $37.95A, £27.50 paper 978-0-2280-1054-8 $120.00S, £85.00 cloth 6 × 9 248pp 4 maps eBook available
