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“A Providential accident”: Nova Scotia in Thomas Merton’s The Waters of Siloe
In the late 1940s, Thomas Merton, the well-known Trappist monk, composed a history of his religious order. In this work, titled The Waters of Siloe , Merton devoted a chapter to Nova Scotia, telling the Trappists’ distinct nineteenth-century episode in the province, beginning with a refugee monk stranded in Halifax in the summer of 1815. This monk – born Jacques Merle in France in 1768 – was known by his devotional name, Father Vincent de Paul (after the seventeenth-century F
Colby Gaudet
Jul 15, 202515 min read
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
Primary Source: Letters from an Acadian Nun to Her Parents, 1884–1893
Last fall, I was looking through the items in the Fonds James Valentine Stuart at the Centre Acadien, Université Sainte-Anne. Born in Halifax in 1806, Stuart married an Acadian – Marguerite-Sophie Melanson – in 1839, and lived the remainder of his life in the port village of Church Point in the township of Clare, Nova Scotia. In the 1860s and 1870s he was a justice of the peace and the customs collector at Belliveau’s Cove, a key port at the time on St. Mary’s Bay.[1] His pap
Colby Gaudet
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