Veritas Series returns with message of hope

The 2021-2022 season of the King’s Campus Ministry Veritas Series for Faith and Culture will begin on September 16, 2021. Cindy Blackstock, the first speaker of the season, is a member of the Gitxsan First Nation who serves as the Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and a professor at McGill University’s School of Social Work. Blackstock will deliver a lecture entitled Reconciling History: Echoes of the Past, linking lessons of history to the contemporary injustices that First Nations children and families experience in the spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Calls to Action.

The theme of the 2021-2022 Veritas Series will be “Seeds of Hope,” which acknowledges that new life and opportunity often follow times of adversity. 

“By trusting in the wisdom that lies embedded within the community, we can collectively find a way forward into a future full of hope,” says Jim Donovan Panchaud, Director of Campus Ministry.

The lectures will be held virtually and/or in-person as public health restrictions allow.

“The Veritas Lecture Series engages speakers from a variety of backgrounds to explore the depth of human experience and to articulate the truth – the fullness of humanity – to which we aspire.  The Catholic Intellectual Tradition welcomes and embraces this exploration as a participation in the common good that enhances the world we inhabit,” says Panchaud.

Other speakers in the series include:

• Dr. Phyllis Zagano, an internationally acclaimed Catholic scholar who has lectured throughout the United States, and in Canada, Europe and Australia, who will speak on October 21, 2021. Dr. Zagano will speak on “Catholic Women, Catholic Church: Where Do We Go from Here?” discussing how many Catholic women, the mainstays of Catholic pastoral ministry, are increasingly frustrated by the Church’s response to requests for increased professional presence of women in ministry.
• Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, CM, Ed.D., president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, who will speak on November 18, 2021. Rev. Holtschneider will speak on “Treasure in Earthen Vessels: Bringing a New Generation into the Catholic Intellectual Life” discussing that while church scandals have made it harder for those who claim this tradition, there is still treasure to be had and given to the next generation.
• Christian Harvey, who has ministered at St. John’s in Peterborough, Ontario in various capacities since 2005, who will speak on February 10, 2022. Harvey’s presentation, entitled “Criminalizing Others for our Comfort: Confronting our Systemic Exclusion of Those Experiencing Homelessness and Marginalization,” exposing the way in which we increase societal harms such as homelessness and marginalization and then blame the very people harmed.

The Veritas Series for Faith and Culture endeavors to foster learning and dialogue by gathering our community together, as we seek to live lives of faith and justice. 

The word veritas comes from the Latin word meaning truth. It is taken directly from the College motto: “Christus est Via, Veritas et Vita” (Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life). The pursuit of truth is at the centre of our mission.

For more information, visit www.kings.uwo.ca/veritas.