New publishing ventures in these perilous days for print are especially welcome when they result in titles like the ones issuing from this new Toronto imprint.

Richard Lougheed is the Christian world's leading expert on the long life, contentious times, and conflicted legacy of Charles Chiniquy (1809-1899), the dedicated Catholic priest and temperance advocate who became an even more dedicated anti-Catholic polemicist and well-traveled evangelist. Chiniquy's career began in Quebec, where he gained great renown for his effective public speaking on behalf of Catholic causes and for the promotion of temperance. His break from the church occurred in stages that were connected with his posting to a congregation of Quebec immigrants in central Illinois. Chiniquy and his Protestant supporters described the conversion as the turn from a false religious system to the truth; his Catholic detractors put it down to an obstreperous personality and serious lapses from Catholic discipline. Whether as Catholic or Protestant, Chiniquy was a flamboyant figure who never shied from publicity—as when he claimed a special friendship with Abraham Lincoln, whom he did in fact encounter as Lincoln plied his trade as a lawyer riding the circuit in Illinois. Chiniquy's many books, including the still-in-print Fifty Years in the Church of Rome (first published, 1885) spread his fame/notoriety in a very wide compass. Lougheed's book is exemplary for its fastidious sifting of often complicated evidence, his patient sorting through claims for and against the embattled controversialist, and an immense mass of material assembled for anyone else who would like to pursue the fascinating international career of a figure who in his day was one of the best known individuals of any kind in Quebec.

The Chiniquy volume is the first in a series entitled Texts and Studies in Protestant History and Thought in Quebec. The second volume (also available in a French edition from the same publisher) is Jason Zuidema's solidly researched and well written biographical study of David Craig, who after missionary service in Nigeria faithfully served as a Presbyterian pastor in Quebec from 1976 to 2001.

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author most recently of The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (InterVarsity Press).

Copyright © 2010 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.