By Their Books Ye Shall Know Them
Three men who died this past summer will probably best be remembered for one outstanding book they each wrote.
Compiled by Sue Careless
Irving Abella (1940-2022) The historian and Jewish community leader, whose ground-breaking work was on Canada’s antisemitic immigration policy in the 1930s and 1940s and the resulting decision to shut the door to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust, died on July 3, the day after his 82nd birthday.
None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948, co-authored with Harold Troper, created a sensation when it was published in 1982, shattering the myth of Canadian openness to outsiders fleeing oppression. The book also served to influence contemporary Canadian immigration policy when a new wave of refugees was seeking to escape persecution, this time from Vietnam.
Mr. Abella’s seminal work, None Is Too Many, was the product of painstaking research with his colleague, Mr. Troper, who discovered thousands of desperate letters written by Jews in Europe in the 1930s to Canadian authorities pleading for a place of refuge in the face of the growing Nazi threat.
“The response was always the same,” the historians wrote. “Unfortunately, though we greatly sympathize with your circumstances, at present, the Canadian government is not admitting Jews. Please try some other country.”
The result was that Canada had one of the most exclusionary policies of any country where Jews sought refuge in the Nazi period. Whereas the U.S. accepted 200,000 Jews between 1933 and 1945, Britain 70,000 and Argentina 50,000, Canada let in only 5,000 Jews and it was only after 1948 that Canada began to accept a significant number of Jewish refugees.
In one of the most chilling cases, in May of 1939 about 1,000 European Jews set sail on the St. Louis for Cuba, where they had visas. But on arrival in Havana, they were denied entry. With no place to go, the ship set sail again and successive countries, including Canada, refused the refugees entry. The St. Louis sailed back to Europe and in the end, 254 of its passengers died at the hands of the Nazis. (In 2018, Canada issued a formal apology for its behaviour in this incident.)
The book also had an immediate effect on Canada’s immigration policy, even before its official publication. It was 1979 and the cabinet of then-Prime Minister Joe Clark was deciding on Canada’s response to the refugee crisis in Southeast Asia that led hundreds of thousands of “boat people” to flee Vietnam.
Mr. Abella and Mr. Troper had shared a copy of the manuscript with Ronald Atkey, the Minister of Immigration, and with his deputy, Jack Manion. The authors included a note: “We hope Canada will not be found wanting in this refugee crisis the way it was in the last.”
Mr. Manion discussed the manuscript with his Minister and stated, “This should not be you.” Mr. Atkey says reading the account of Canada’s failure to protect Jews fleeing the Holocaust “stiffened my resolve to be bold.” From an initial goal of bringing in just 8,000 boat people a year, Ottawa ended up taking in 50,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos by the end of 1980.
“We were already disposed to act but this was a compelling historical context and it confirmed our view that this kind of outreach and embrace [of refugees] should be part of the Canadian tradition,” Mr. Clark told The Globe.
“None is too many” was the response given by a high-level Canadian government official when asked how many Jews should be accepted into the country, during the time of the Nazi persecution.
In 1990, Mr. Abella published A Coat of Many Colours: Two Centuries of Jewish Life in Canada to accompany an exhibit of the same name that year at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.
Mr. Abella served as president of the Canadian Jewish Congress from 1992 to 1995. He was named a member of the Order of Canada in 1993, but he believed that his greatest accomplishment was creating the first university course in Canadian Jewish studies at Toronto’s Glendon College in the early 1970s.
–Excerpted from Alan Freeman’s obituary of Irving Abella, which was published in the Globe and Mail, July 4, 2022
Ronald Sider (1939 – 2022), author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity, died July 27. He was 83.
Published in 1977, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger was later hailed by Christianity Today as one of the one hundred most influential books in religion in the 20th century. It went on to sell over 400,000 copies in many languages.
Ron Sider was a Canadian-born American theologian and social activist, who founded Evangelicals for Social Action, a think-tank which seeks to develop biblical solutions to social and economic problems. He was also a founding board member of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment
Sider was born in Fort Erie, Ontario, in 1939 and was raised on a 275-acre farm. His father was not only a farmer but also a pastor in the Brethren in Christ Church, an Anabaptist and Wesleyan tradition that combined concern for holiness, a commitment to peace, and a literalist reading of the Sermon on the Mount.
Sider attended Waterloo Lutheran University in Waterloo, Ontario. While there, he came in contact with the apologetic work of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and set his sights on a career in academia. He later earned his PhD in history from Yale.
In 1968, he accepted an invitation from Messiah College to teach at its newly opened Philadelphia Campus in the inner city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The racism, poverty and evangelical indifference he observed at close hand made a deep impression that led him to write the book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.
What he saw as the injustice of the inner city motivated Sider to work toward developing a biblical response to social injustice.
Sider’s opponents typically criticize his ideas as consisting of bad theology and bad economics. David Chilton’s book, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators (1986), argues that Sider’s book takes a position contrary to the biblical teachings on economics, poverty and giving, and that the economic model it provides is untenable.
Sider significantly revised the book for the twentieth anniversary edition and, in an interview with Christianity Today magazine said, “I admit, though, that I didn’t know a great deal of economics when I wrote the first edition of Rich Christians. In the meantime, I’ve learned considerably more, and I’ve changed some things as a result of that. For example, in the new, twentieth-anniversary edition, I say more explicitly that when the choice is democratic capitalism or communism, I favor the democratic political order and market economies.”
Sider was a prolific author. Completely Pro-Life, published in the mid-1980s, calls on Christians to take a consistent stand opposing abortion, capital punishment, nuclear weapons, hunger and other conditions that Sider saw as anti-life.
“We continue to be very concerned with abortion and we’re opposed to abortion,” said Sider, then president emeritus of Evangelicals for Social Action, in an RNS interview after speaking to an evangelical conference that preceded the 2016 March for Life. “We want to reduce it, but it also relates to death by starvation and smoking and racism.”
In August 2009, he signed a public statement encouraging all Christians to read, wrestle with, and respond to Caritas in Veritate, the social encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI. Later that year, he also gave his approval to the Manhattan Declaration, calling on evangelicals, Catholics and Orthodox not to comply with rules and laws permitting abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences.
–Sources: Wikipedia and RNS
Kallistos (Timothy) Ware (1934-2022) is perhaps best known as the author of The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, published when he was a layman in 1963. It has subsequently been revised, most recently in 2015.
Now, almost 70 years later, Ware’s book has become established throughout the English-speaking world as the standard introduction to the Orthodox Church.
At 368 pages, the book is accessible and easy to read. Nevertheless, Ware does not leave out details and the book is rich in names, dates and the specific nuances of Orthodox theological positions.
Timothy (Kallistos) Ware was an Anglican convert to Orthodox Christianity. Since the Anglican tradition itself reflects the dual Protestant and Roman Catholic character of the Western Church, Ware was an ideal candidate for explaining the Eastern Orthodox Church to Western Christians of any background.
Ware introduces the reader to Orthodox Christianity in two parts: history and theology. The first half of the book is dedicated to the history of the Orthodox Church and is divided chronologically from the Acts of the Apostles to the 11th Century Schism to the attacks made by the militant atheists of Soviet Russia. The second half of the book is dedicated to the theology of the Orthodox Church, looking at a very wide variety of theological issues such as the nature of God, the role of the Church and its sacraments and the requirements for a reunion between the Eastern and the Western Church.
While Ware does assert the Orthodox Church as the one true Church, he also is careful to emphasize the value of other Christian traditions.
In 1979, Ware produced a companion volume, The Orthodox Way. It too has been revised.
Ware also collaborated in the translation and publication of major Orthodox ascetic and liturgical texts including The Lenten Triodion, The Festal Menaion and Philokalia, which is a classic text of Orthodox spirituality.
Born Timothy Richard Ware in 1934 to an Anglican family in Bath, England, Ware took a double first in classics and theology at Oxford.
On 14 April 1958, at the age of 24, he embraced the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith. He described his first contacts with Orthodoxy and the growing attraction of the Orthodox Church in an autobiographical text entitled “My Journey to the Orthodox Church.” While still a layman, he spent six months in Canada at a monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad.
In 1966, he was ordained to the priesthood within the Ecumenical Patriarchate and was tonsured as a monk, receiving the name “Kallistos.” In 1966, Ware became Spalding Lecturer at the University of Oxford in Eastern Orthodox studies, a position he held for 35 years until his retirement in 2001. Ware continued to teach at the University of Oxford and served in the Greek Orthodox parish in Oxford. After his retirement, Ware continued to publish and to give lectures on Orthodox Christianity. In 1982 he was consecrated a bishop and in 2007 was elevated to Metropolitan.
In a 2011 interview with the Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today, he said:
“We Orthodox are still certainly too inward looking; we should realize that we have a message that many people will listen to gladly. … To me, the most important missionary witness that we have is the Divine Liturgy, the Eucharistic worship of the Orthodox Church. This is the life-giving source from which everything else proceeds. And therefore, to those who show an interest in Orthodoxy, I say, ‘Come and see. Come to the liturgy.’ The first thing is that they should have an experience of Orthodoxy – or for that matter, of Christianity – as a worshiping community. We start from prayer, not from an abstract ideology, not from moral rules, but from a living link with Christ expressed through prayer.”
In 2017, Ware was awarded the Lambeth Cross for Ecumenism by the Archbishop of Canterbury “for his outstanding contribution to Anglican–Orthodox theological dialogue.”
He died at his home in Oxford on Aug. 27 at the age of 87. TAP
Sources: Wikipedia and Christianity Today.
