Tradition and Tension: The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1945– 1985. By Stuart Macdonald. Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2025. xix + 298 pp. $37.95 paper.

preconceived scholarly edifice.This consistent deployment of theory is part of the book's theatrics.A question must be asked: does such an aesthetic and theoretical approach really permit a scholar to listen to the documents?This is certainly up for debate.The position one takes on such a question will likely relate to one's scholarly tools of choice.To lay my own cards on the table: I am writing a book on a diocesan priest, a prolific abuser, who never leaves his archdiocese.I prefer a more inductive method related to the approach we call "microhistory."I think it necessary to do more showing, especially as it relates to sources and even broad paradigms, than telling.Yet, I recognize the balance is very difficult to strike.Authors have to tell readers what things mean.O'Neill's choice to frame the book as "making" and "unmaking" is indeed generative.Yet, I am left desiring more thickness in each and every description.This would permit us to learn more about the history of clergy abuse from the Roney case.As O'Neill notes in the conclusion, Unforgivable is the start of a much larger research project on the movement of abuser-priests across borders.This book is a prequel.Or perhaps it is better understood as a beachhead from which he will stage a much more sustained operation.He is now at work connecting America, Latin America and Rome into a much wider web.The work at hand here is analytically rich, provocative, and exquisitely written at the sentence level.It marks a genesis for a wider exploration of priesthood, abuse, the state, global transfers, and survivors.In the end, perhaps we can see its aesthetic and literary approach as grounds to raise important ethical questions.What is the most appropriate way to write about such a nefarious and abusive character like Roney?What is the responsibility of the researcher when writing about the superiorsthe enablersof such behaviors?If one writes a book on a single priest, how should survivors come into the narrative?Unforgivable defines its subject more than it allows its subject to self-define.Scholars, we should note, also "make" and "unmake" subjects.

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