Newman AGM 2024, Keynote by Gerry Turcotte

Corpus Christi College and St. Mark's College's very own President and Principal, Gerry Turcotte, will be kicking us off with a keynote talk: The Joy of Faith & the Power of Transformative Education.
Afterwards, please join us at the Annual General Meeting proper as we launch the new association year to confirm the next set of leaders for the Executive Team.
Tea, coffee and refreshments will be provided. Come meet familiar and new faces alike of the Newman community.

The Joy of Faith & the Power of Transformative Education.
Keynote by President Gerry Turcotte
Catholic Colleges and Universities have been champions of education for centuries and have helped shape generations of learners. Indeed, the Church founded the very first universities and has continued to steward moral, ethical, and spiritual values to this day. Now, however, many of our educational institutions are under threat, and our learners enter our halls besieged by secular world values that can appear, at times, to be antithetical to the moral lessons that are the very foundation of our faith. This talk will examine my call for a shift towards a celebration of the joy of faith, and a need for education to embrace, more than ever, a ‘charism’ for social justice.

Biography
Gerry Turcotte became President of Corpus Christi College and Principal of St. Mark’s College in 2022. Before this he was President and Vice-Chancellor of St. Mary’s University, Calgary, for 11 years.
He is a graduate of McGill University (BA), the University of Ottawa (MA) and the University of Sydney, in Australia (PhD) which he attended on a Commonwealth Fellowship.
He is the author and editor of 20 books including the novel Flying in Silence which was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year in 2001 and Border Crossings: Words & Images, a mixed media text that published the photographs from his one-person exhibition at a major Australian Art gallery, and the text of a performance for music and words which he performed live at the Sydney Opera House.
His publications include The History of the Novel in English: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, published by Oxford University Press (OUP) and Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature & the Postcolonial Gothic, shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Award for Literary Criticism.
His trilogy of faith reflections — Small Things, Big Things, and One Last Thing — was published by Novalis, and gathers some of the hundreds of columns that he has written for major Catholic newspapers. These we recently collected in a new publication: The Sum of All Things: Essays Old & New (2023).
He is the recipient of City, State and National recognitions for Excellence in Teaching while in Australia. He was made a Paul Harris Fellow by Rotary and was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Canadian Studies in 2011, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013, and the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal for services to education and the community in 2023. In 2022 he was granted his Blackfoot name — “Mountain Thunder” — by Blackfoot Elder Casey Eagle Speaker, in recognition of his work supporting Reconciliation.

Host or Publisher The Newman Association of Vancouver