Workshops

After attending several funerals over the years that I might classify as "insert-name-of-the-deceased-here," the idea of offering a workshop on using writers' techniques in funeral sermons took root. In the spring of 2025, I pitched this concept to the esteemed Lester Randall Preaching Fellowship, an event I attend in Toronto every year, the 'Woodstock' for preachers, as I like to describe it. It was a delight and an honour to offer this workshop in October, 2025, with the th

In 2016, by a strange turn of events, I was invited to present at the McGill University CREOR (Centre for Research on Religion) conference, an annual inter-disciplinary gathering called "Frontiers." The topic that year was right up my alley: "Cosmos, Curiosity, Creativity." All presentations -- some of them in the realm of astrophysics -- were riffs on the following statement: Human cultures approach religious questions in ways informed by their cosmologies and vice versa ,

In 2010, I was blessed to be able to spend a week with the Iona Community on the island of Iona in the inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, part of a course in Worship that I was taking at Emmanuel College. To say that this week was life changing is a cliche, but it was. Inspired by the pilgrimage that takes place on Iona on Tuesdays, as a course assignment, I created a pilgrimage located in the City of Guelph, my hometown at the time. The pilgrimage begins at th