Cardus launches annual lecture series as part of its 25th anniversary celebrations
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
9 April, 2025
OTTAWA — Cardus is launching a new annual event to honour the late Sen. Ian Shugart, a former clerk of the privy council. The Ian Shugart Lecture Series will honour the life and work of Ian Shugart in the federal public service by highlighting and exploring the creative possibilities, tensions, and realities that accompany the integration of faith and public life. The speakers of this series of annual lectures will take seriously the role that faith plays—even imperceptibly—in modern Canadian life, and how enduring commitments rooted in faith act as shaping forces of our life together.
“Ian spoke through his actions, living his Christian faith in public life as a member of the federal public service and as a senator,” says Brian Dijkema, President – Canada for Cardus. “We’re launching this lecture series as part of Cardus’s 25th anniversary to restart the conversation about faith in public life.”
Ian Shugart (May 31, 1957–October 25, 2023) is most widely remembered as a model Canadian public servant. His career spanned over forty years of service to Canada and ended with his appointments as the twenty-fourth clerk of the Privy Council and then as a Canadian senator. He died in office at the age of sixty-six, mourned by his wife, his three children, his colleagues, and all who had interactions with him in public life.
The inaugural lecture in the Ian Shugart Lecture Series is scheduled for November 20, 2025 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat consistently advocates for a society that is open toward religious faith and its public expression. He is known for showing how commitments rooted in faith often persist, sometimes making surprising appearances in modern life. In his Shugart Lecture, Douthat will challenge both religious and non-religious people to wrestle with the reality of religion, its place in our public policy debates, and how our shared norms may need to change.
Learn more about the Ian Shugart Lecture Series.
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Cardus is a non-partisan think tank dedicated to clarifying and strengthening, through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.