Living Stones: St James' Church, Kingston, 1845-1995

John D. Blackwell is co-ordinator of information services, Arthur A.
Wishart Library, Algoma University College, Sault Ste. Marie.

Church histories tend to be amateurish endeavors. Living Stones,
however, is a notable exception. Written by a sociology professor at
Queen’s University, this lavishly illustrated, albumlike volume
presents an intelligent and highly readable account of the 150-year
history of Kingston’s second-oldest Anglican parish.

Lyon traces St. James’s development from a mission for destitute
Irish immigrants in Stuartville (a disease-ridden slum outside Kingston)
to a comfortable, middle-class university parish. He explores St.
James’s strong “low church” tradition, rooted in evangelical Irish
Protestantism, and the parish’s longstanding connection with Wycliffe
College, the evangelical divinity school at the University of Toronto. A
measure of the church’s stability is the fact that it has had only
nine rectors during its 15-decade history.

Lyon goes beyond merely tracing the evolution of the parish, providing
biographical sketches of its clergy, and chronicling alterations to the
church’s “Ontario gothic” fabric. He ably places the parish within
the wider context of the Kingston, Canadian, and international
communities— and therein lies the book’s greatest strength. Lyon
discusses Kingston’s economic booms and busts, Orangeism,
Tractarianism, temperance, the Social Gospel, mission work,
lay–clerical relations, the Depression, the impact of two world wars,
the baby boom, the turbulent 1960s, the ensuing secularism and
fragmentation of the 1970s and 1980s, and the uncertainty of the
postmodern era.

The author draws extensively from the rich primary and secondary
sources of Canadian Anglicanism. The text is carefully documented in
endnotes, and two appendices present informative demographic and
financial data. Unfortunately, this volume lacks an index, which would
have permitted easier access to the broad spectrum of topics and issues
covered.

Living Stones is a valuable contribution to the rapidly growing
literature on Canadian religious history. It offers an astonishingly
frank perspective not only on the past but also on the present and on
the future. This book will be of wide interest and should be read in
conjunction with St. George’s Cathedral [Kingston]: Two Hundred Years
of Community (1991).