Michael Ledger-Lomas

The title of the philosopher Charles Taylor’s previous big book, from 2016, defined humans as The Language Animal. Like many of his grand assertions, the phrase works best as a description of himself. As a McGill graduate in mid-’50s Europe, Taylor first encountered Johann Gottfried Herder’s arguments that a language is not just a means of communication but a question of existential…

Richard Blanshard has left little trace in British Columbia, except for the thoroughfare named after him in Victoria. In March 1850, he arrived in what was then the colony of Vancouver Island as its first governor, but he stuck it out there for only eighteen months, half of which he spent waiting for London to accept his…

Canadians often contrast their secular ways with the strange religious enthusiasms that haunt public life in the United States. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the shoe was on the other foot. Statesmen here routinely contrasted our God-fearing culture and schools with America’s separation of church and state, which had let unbelief and immorality run…

Edwin Landseer’s oil painting Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864) luridly expresses how Sir John Franklin’s contemporaries felt about his doomed expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Two polar bears hunch in the wreckage of a vessel strewn across the ice. One sinks its teeth into a tattered Red Ensign; the other rises from feeding on a sailor’s whitened rib…

One warm Saturday night in September 1907, Vancouver witnessed a riot. A crowd that had gathered for the founding meeting of the Asiatic Exclusion League headed to Chinatown, where hooligans systematically smashed the windows of businesses. The growing mob proceeded to Powell Street, the centre of the city’s Japanese community, where forewarned residents beat them off. The rioters returned on Sunday and were again…

Egerton Ryerson’s role in the creation of residential schools, however debatable, has prompted his erasure from Canadian public memory. Most dramatically, in June 2021, his statue was toppled and beheaded on the campus that then bore his name; the following year, the institution rebranded itself Toronto Metropolitan University. Yet, as Robert Crocker notes in Religion and Schooling in Canada…

The small town of Lytton, British Columbia, endured the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada during the heat dome of June 2021. The next day, it was largely destroyed by wildfire. Climate activists have since stencilled its name on bridges in Vancouver, along with the question “How do you like the Anthropocene so far?” Lytton may now be shorthand for ecological…

To visit Stanley Park, the Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson wrote over a century ago in Legends of Vancouver, was to enter an “atmosphere of holiness.” Just as “viewing a stately cathedral” improved us, so “none of us can stand amid that majestic forest group without experiencing some elevating thoughts, some refinement of our coarser nature.” In equating and perhaps conflating the spiritual effects on humans of trees and…