The Founding Moment: Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion, 48)

by William Westfall

In The Founding Moment William Westfall details the founding of Trinity College, telling the story of an important group of Anglicans who tried to respond creatively to the powerful social forces reshaping English-speaking Canada in the middle of the nineteenth century.

He explores the motives, goals, and social and religious ideas that were behind the creation of this important institution of higher education, explaining the reasons Trinity was founded, the role it played in Canadian society, and the way its founding doctrines were transformed into a functioning college. He also challenges the social and educational views of the founders, giving voice to those who did not share the founders' vision and criticized the course the college was determined to pursue. These dissenting voices help us understand the problems the new college faced and the steps a new generation of leadership would take to point the college in a new direction, and define a very different relationship with the modern world.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 2002

Reviews

[Dasha]

For being such a short book (under 130 pages) Westfall does an excellent job tracing the first few decades of Trinity College, specifically focusing on its religious foundations. The work highlights the founding members focus on the college as a religious space, on private land funded by private donors, that encapsulated the idea of family - safe and educational. However, after the death of Bishop Strachan, the founder, changes slowly began to occur in order to accommodate the changing Canadian context. By the time it incorporated with UofT in 1904 it had changed so greatly in it's approach to education that there was very little different between it and UofT.

I found Westfall's analysis of the family analogy particularly compelling and complementary to ideas of the Victorian era's patriarchal domesticity (specifically, patriarchal domesticity's application to education in the home).