Archbishop Mark MacDonald speaks about charity among the Ojibwe as an "obstacle" to Christianity

Archbishop MacDonald refers to the early account of Ojibwe society provided by Johann Georg Kohl, a German ethnologist who visited the Ojibwe near Lake Superior in 1855. By Kohl’s description, what distinguished Ojibwe society from Western society was their extensive charity and sharing of resources - practices that Kohl saw as the “principal obstacle” between the Ojibwe and Western Christianity, but that Archbishop MacDonald recognized as being consistent with the recorded practices of early Christian communities (as noted in the Bible, in Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32-35).