Canadian Women Shaping Diasporic Religious Identities

This collection of essays explores how women from a variety of religious and cultural communities have contributed to the richly textured, pluralistic society of Canada. Focusing on women’s religiosity, it examines the ways in which they have carried and conserved, and brought forward and transformed their cultures - old and new - in modern Canada.

Each essay explores the ways in which the religiosities of women serve as locations for both the assertion and the refashioning of individual and communal identity in transcultural contexts. Three shared assumptions guide these essays: religion plays a dynamic role in the shaping and reshaping of social cultures; women are active participants in their transmission and their transformation; and a focus on women’s activities within their religious traditions - often informal and unofficial - provides new perspectives on the intersection of religion, gender, and transnationalism.

Since the first European migrations, Canada has been shaped by immigrant communities as they negotiated the tension between preserving their religious and cultural traditions and embracing the new opportunities in their adopted homeland. Viewing those interactions through the lens of women’s religiosity, the essays in this collection model an innovative approach and provide new perspectives for students and researchers of Canadian Studies, Religious Studies, and Women’s Studies.