Apparently pumpkin spice poutine is a thing. I’m intrigued.
Well, the health region here closed a bunch of their CPE training places and we also lost a couple mainline schools that were involved in local training so there was kind of a deficit going into Covid, and then the nursing staff realized how much value chaplains bring, so now it’s correction time.
Yeah, imagine building institutional permission to move slowly. What a gift that would be.
It is really hard to find enough CPE though.
I know locally here there’s been huge demand from the hospitals for chaplaincy post-Covid and none of the seminaries or other chaplaincy training options can keep up. We’ll see how long that lasts though.
Say more about the more than cohort aspect?
A “who’s who” of modern theology that would make your department a place really want to go because they’d get to meet and take classes from/hear lectures from the world’s best.
If I had that kind of money to play with, first tackle student housing, then perpetually free tuition, then start seeding some research centres in particular areas of study that fit the school’s priorities. Take a page from Stanford’s Phil dept and just get a Rita of visiting scholars representing -
Well, the Canadian example that comes to mind is the Anglican studies program at St Paul’s. They used to have 3 faculty but now it’s just Sarah and a very modest endowment, but she’s been able to use that to host all sorts of departmental events that have strengthened the whole faculty.