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The analysis of the positions taken by Canadian Jewish Congress on the issues affecting the repression of civil liberties and the infringement of the rights of religious non-Catholic minorities in Quebec in the decade following the Second World War shed new light on our understanding of the place held by representatives of the Jewish community in the social human rights movement in Canada. The CJC – the main voice of the community – in fact remained on the fringe of the movement protesting the Duplessis regime, refusing to condemn the Padlock Act and supporting the repression of the Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious minorities considered to be “seditious” or “subversive.” The controversies that ensued due to these positions demonstrate the ideological, regional, and class divisions the Jewish community and the “human rights community” were undergoing in the postwar period. They expose the tensions that existed within the CJC, between the leaders from Ontario and the Canadian West and their counterparts in Quebec, confronted more directly with the repressive “great darkness” and the pattern of inter-faith relations in this mainly Catholic province. On a theoretical level, this study demonstrates that human rights are a fluid discursive category that may be mobilized differently according to activists, based on their ideologies, their identities, their interests, and the local context in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of the various possible relationships between religion and nationalism, this article focuses on the study of denationalizing theodicies. These theodicies are connected to various communities which are peripheral with respect to the systems of historical action. We therefore propose an idealtypic model to contrast the nationalization and clericalization processes, which legitimate state and church bureaucracies, with the theisation and denationalization processes of dissident religious movements. This model is then used to decipher the relationships between three religious groups--the Jehovah's Witnesses the Montreal Hassidim and the Catholic Pentecostalists--and the nationalist processes connected with the production and reproduction of the Canadian and Quebec states. The various transactions made lead to a limited partial acceptance of the State--particularly the Canadian state--on the part of the groups analysed, but a persistent rejection of the codes of national recognition, i.e. of nationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was Bryan R. Wilson who once remarked that the Jehovah's witnesses are so much concerned with recruitment that their whole movement is organised essentially towards the work of "publishing the good news" (Wilson, 1967:15). In a sense this remark is somewhat deceptive. The work of "publishing the good news" should not be mixed up with genuine recruitment, the latter being a possible--but not a necessary--sequel to the former. All Witnesses are engaged in publishing their message, convenient or inconvenient ; they are engaged in straight recruitment, however, only when and where they see their chance. Not all individuals outside the Watch Tower movement are, as it were, cut out for becoming serious candidates for membership, and the ordinary Witness is fully aware of this. Therefore, trying to avoid casting pearls before swine, he only proceeds to deliberate recruitment alter having separated non-promising and promising outsiders. In this paper the latter category is examined on the basis of Dutch research data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russell's failure to provide his movement with a clear authority structure together with the disappointment of 1914 led to central and local schisms alter his death, in which informal elites in the movement struggled for power. Russell's movement split into different groups, each emphasising a part of his message. The Pastoral Bible Institute catered for the introversionist perspective of individual character development and contemplative study ; the Laymen's Home Missionary Movement emphasised the exegetical and doctrinal complexity purveyed by a charismatic leader; the Watch Tower Society under Rutherford concentrated on evangelisation and en passant a rigid, centrally controlled sect structure ; and finally the Dawn Bible Student Association catered for those elements in Russell's following who eschewed the extremes and moved towards a denominational position, Rutherford, through the Watch Tower Society, succeeded in changing all aspects of the sect from 1919 to 1932 and created the Jehovah's Witnesses--a schismatic offshoot from the Bible student community. The subsequent development of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Bible student groups is used to illustrate a number of central sociological issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Watch Tower movement saw considerable expansion in northern France, especially in the mining basin where it essentially recruited Polish emigrant workers, but also French workers in lesser proportions. The author attempts to retrace the history of the spread of the movement in this region and examines the causes of its unique development in France. These causes could be linked to the social conditions of this population: social and cultural change, unsatisfied expectations, absence of political power, a crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church. They could also be subsumed under a more global hypothesis according to which the Watch Tower movement would have constituted a substitute homeland for the emigrant Polish workers. As for the French Jehovah's Witnesses, it was seen that they partially shared the Polish workers' fate, and individual particularities had to be taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]