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Gerry Turcotte

Turcotte is President and Vice-Chancellor at St. Mark’s and Corpus Christi College, University of British Columbia.

Figure of Speech: Resolving myself to a Year of Depth

January 31, 2019

It is fashionable for columnists to devote the first column of the new year to resolutions — those kept and those broken. For the record, I’ve done both.

Figure of Speech: This story of devotion hinges on hinges

December 24, 2018

At St. Mary’s University here in Calgary, we open all our meetings with a reflection. Sometimes it is the university prayer, but often it is a meditation on a relevant issue, meant to support, comfort and uplift.

Figure of speech: Ghost images remind us of the great cycle of life

November 29, 2018

As a photographer, I always assumed my interests were odd. My preferred subjects were dilapidated buildings, rusted metals and abandoned spaces. I love detailed closeups of ghost phrases — slogans and ads painted on crumbling surfaces that are still just visible to the eye, decades after the products were available. Driving through the countryside I will often pull over to photograph a collapsed shed, a rusted sign or a crumbling wall.

Figure of Speech: Selfies and looking beyond the lens

November 5, 2018

Recently I Googled the term “selfie” and determined quickly that no further research into the matter was needed. What I found were endless varieties of scantily clad self-representations, with very little analysis about why anyone would transmit these images about themselves, or what the images were meant to suggest other than an easily accessible sexuality occurring in epidemic proportions (79 million images on Instagram alone that fall into this category).

Figure of Speech: Catholic values drive universities’ goals

October 22, 2018

When we speak of Catholic education it is almost a cliché to begin by saying that universities were born from the Church and to give Bologna and Oxford as examples of the foundational role the Church played in the development of higher education.

Figure of Speech: Listen to what the Lord wants us to hear

October 1, 2018

Mondegreens are those wonderful phenomena in language where a misheard phrase is substituted for the real thing, usually in music. The term comes from American writer Sylvia Wright who explained that she misheard the phrase “and laid him on the green” in a Scottish ballad as “and Lady Mondegreen.”

Figure of Speech: Church music can build our stairway to Heaven

August 22, 2018

One of my favourite bloopers from a church bulletin reads like this: “Eight new choir robes are currently needed, due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.”

Figure of speech: Is anything so beautiful as the magical alchemy of sacred language?

June 19, 2018

I grew up in a hardware store. Not one of the fancy big box stores that occupy acres of inner city landscapes. My dad’s store was a small, rundown shack that he built as far out in the city as he could in order to afford the land.

Figure of speech: Restored water tower is an oasis of healing

April 19, 2018

Thanks to generous donors, St. Mary’s University in Calgary was recently able to complete the restoration of our nearly 100-year-old water tower. Built by the Sisters of Providence in 1921, the tower has stood over the Midnapore site for nearly a century, its fortunes waxing and waning — mostly waning — over time.