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Ecclesiastical Kinship at Pointe-de-l’Église: A Case of Church and Community Formations
Currently, as of summer 2025, the former Église Sainte-Marie in Nova Scotia's municipality of Clare faces the threat of possible demolition. Amid declining church attendance among Canadians generally, hundreds of communities across the country have faced such a predicament in recent decades. Underutilized and decaying church buildings have been demolished and replaced by other structures. I suggest here that the case of Sainte-Marie is distinct, setting it apart from many chu
Colby Gaudet
Aug 29, 202515 min read
Rachel, Daughter of Hagar, Daughter of Bathsheba: Some Preliminary Observations on Late-Eighteenth-Century Black Anglicans of Digby, Nova Scotia
During the research I conducted for my PhD thesis, I spent several visits at the Nova Scotia Archives looking through the parish records of Roger Viets, the Anglican missionary at Digby from the 1780s into the early 1800s.[1] Viets was a Loyalist clergyman who migrated to Nova Scotia from Connecticut during the American Revolution. In 1786 he was appointed to the Loyalist congregation at Digby by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (the missionary arm of the Church
Colby Gaudet
Aug 12, 20249 min read
Olaudah Equiano's Nova Scotian Interlude, 1758
Olaudah Equiano was an eighteenth-century writer and abolitionist. When he was thirteen and enslaved to a British naval officer, he visited Nova Scotia. He stopped in Halifax and participated in the seige of Louisbourg. In his memoir, he recounted details of those events.
Colby Gaudet
Primary Source: Sarah Bancroft, Antinomian Prophetess of the Annapolis Valley, 1791
In the early 1790s, in the lower Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, there lived a woman known locally as “The Prophetess.” Her name was Sarah Bancroft, and she was an antinomian preacher in the radical New Light tradition of Protestant evangelism. As a prophet, Bancroft preached publicly about the urgency of recognizing and confessing one’s sins in the hopes of experiencing a spiritual conversion (or New Birth) through God’s grace. The New Light message of spiritual rebirth had
Colby Gaudet
Sisters of Charity Burials, Mount Olivet Cemetery, Halifax
In my recent research pursuit of Sister Mary Bernard (1852–1937), who I discussed in my last post, I discovered that she was buried at the Mount Olivet Cemetery, here in Halifax.
Colby Gaudet
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