Begins with the church–state relationship, noting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms takes into account the effects of federation, particularly the position of Quebec and the associated complications of laïcité, also addresses the legacy and current impact of bijuralism. Provides an overview of the contemporary relevant legal framework, as governed by statutory and constitutional provisions, noting the extent to which the country is a signatory state to international law. Gives an account of the law relating to the definition of “religion” and “belief”. Examines the church–state relationship as illustrated by case law relating to the freedoms of religion, association and expression. Focuses on the effect of equality and non-discrimination law on the church–state relationship as illustrated by case law. Concludes by considering the nature and extent of jurisdictional congruity with USA as regards their current interpretation of the principle; highlighting distinctive Canadian characteristics; identifying particular principles or rules relied upon by the judiciary or administrative bodies; and assesses the significance of cultural context as a differentiating factor.

The chapter examines the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, the foundational text for Jesuit practice, and finds there a rich psychoanalytic dynamism between satisfaction and frustration, imagination and reality, and an insistent demand for a creative, affective response to the problems it forces the exercitant to face.

The chapter finds in Ulysses the logical end to Loyola’s project. It is Joyce’s most radical experiment thus far in creating his own ‘exercise’, his own set of impossible demands on the reader. It closely reads a particularly overloaded passage from the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses, a particular structure of paranoid frustration that Joyce has worked on before but one that here entails a most unstable position from the reader in the quest for that ‘sincere irony’ Loyola and Joyce demand.

The conclusion surveys the arguments made, leading to a new theory of readerly transference.

The chapter takes this Kleinian framework and uses it to read the texts and theological practices of Loyola and the Jesuit order. It illuminates the ways Loyola’s problems of reading, belief, and paranoia would have come to Joyce – more than a simple matter of ‘influence’, as most studies of religion and Joyce would have it, but as an implicit, peculiar set of problems Joyce would adapt and employ in his own work.

The chapter lays out the argument of the book: that Joyce’s texts elaborate a set of problems posed by Ignatius Loyola, working these problems into new approaches to narration, hermeneutics, and irony. It also situates this argument in wider contexts of Joyce studies, current theories of reading, negative theology, and the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein.

Charles Baudelaire’s notion of the flaneur – a figure who mingles with crowds and street scenes but also observes and documents the sights from a distance – captures well the early life of John Kennedy Toole and the character of Ignatius Reilly at the center of his famous novel. Ignatius is modeled upon a colleague of Toole’s at a small college in Lafayette, Louisiana, a scholar of Medieval culture and history who came from New Orleans. It also traces the novel’s publication history and extraordinary success in the Spanish-speaking world, as well as the tragic end to young novelist’s life by suicide.