Principal’s Message

Greetings from Emmanuel College and the start of the New Year in the academic world!

I hope you all had a wonderful summer.

This will be an exciting year to be part of the Emmanuel community. I am especially pleased to be connecting with you here in our new print magazine, EC News. There is still something special about a print publication.

We are also welcoming our biggest incoming class in recent memory and preparing to celebrate some significant anniversaries.

Our enrolment has almost doubled in the last 10 years, which is especially remarkable given the theological landscape in Canada and the United States. In 2014, 93 students were enrolled across all years of Emmanuel’s basic degree programs. This month we are welcoming the exact same number of incoming students—93—into those basic degree programs. These new students are evenly divided among the Buddhist, Christian and Muslim streams.

I credit this remarkable success to the dedication of staff who have worked hard on recruitment and the groundbreaking scholarship and dedicated teaching of our remarkable faculty. I also believe that the enthusiastic promotion of Emmanuel College by our fantastic alumni has helped to raise the school’s profile and driven this incredible growth.

More students require more support. This year, Emmanuel College awarded close to $900,000 in scholarships, prizes and bursaries, a 10 per cent increase over last year.

We are so grateful to all our donors who have named or contributed to scholarships at Emmanuel.

We have so much to celebrate in the coming year!

In 2025, Emmanuel will mark the 10th and 15th anniversaries of the Buddhist and Muslim foci of our Master of Psychospiritual Studies Program, formerly the Master of Pastoral Studies. We will also mark the United Church of Canada’s centennial.

I hope you are excited and ready to witness these historic moments with me! It will be good practice for 2028 when we celebrate the centenary of the founding of Emmanuel College, for which we have already begun to prepare a full calendar of events. One of the ways we will celebrate the 2025 milestones is the unveiling of the Indigenous Healing Garden, a tangible sign of our commitment to engage with Indigenous issues, promote ecological sustainability and continue our reconciliation journey. Stay tuned for details!

Principal HyeRan Kim-Cragg