The Emmanuel College Alumni/ae Association Awards

Distinguished Alumni/ae Award

The Emmanuel College Alumni/ae Association established the Emmanuel College Distinguished Alumni/ae Award in 2008 to honour and bring attention to graduates of the College whose vision and leadership have distinguished them through extraordinary and exemplary ministry to the church, academy, or society at large. Such recent or lifetime service and contribution can be at the local, national or international level.

2020 Distinguished Alumni/ae Award Recipient

The Emmanuel College Alumni/ae Association (ECAA) has named the Rev. Dr. HyeRan Kim-Cragg Emm 0T6, Timothy Eaton Memorial Church Professor of Preaching, the 2020 winner of the Distinguished Alumni/ae Award for her impressive achievements in preaching and religious education, including postcolonial, feminist and anti-racist theories to address the urgent issues of our time.

For Kim-Cragg, it has always been imperative that academic work extends beyond the academy and “even beyond the church itself” to address issues of social importance in the real world. A true vocational gift, she stresses, is the ability to bring about social justice while exalting God. As a practical theologian who places postcolonial and feminist thought at the centre of her homiletics and religious education, Kim-Cragg uses an intersectional approach in her preaching, research and pedagogy that centers on race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexual orientation. She feels honored and privileged to be part of such a forward-thinking school as Emanuel College. A postcolonial and intersectional approach, she argues, is important, as our students “have come from all over the world, and their lives have been directly and indirectly impacted by colonialism.

Kim-Cragg believes that a thorough examination of the Church’s colonial history should be “the responsibility of Christian theology,” as the Church has advanced cultural imperialism and Christian supremacy throughout its past. We also need feminism to counter the misogyny that continues to be promoted under the guise of Christian mission in many parts of the world. As hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children have recently been located on the former grounds of Canada’s residential schools, it “is a critical case in point that the hidden past haunts the present,” forcing us to ask, “How do we preach about it?”

Kim-Cragg sees education as “sacred and sacramental” because it can build on human dignity by paying attention to the situated realities, particular subjectivities and lived experiences of our students. In her pedagogy, she strives to bring students to an understanding of how “their own kind of leadership [can] serve the world” by questioning that which has been obscured from view, and by recognizing the partiality of knowledge and the multiplicity of truths.

In advocating for a postcolonial pedagogy, Kim-Cragg is interested in breaking new ground by examining the “[. . .] concentric circles of community within which we all live,” circles of interdependence that cross the lines of “family, church or faith communities, nation, religion […] and the planet Earth, the biggest circle within which all living things find themselves.” She insists that paying close attention to what is happening locally, nationally and globally is an integral part of a postcolonial, feminist and antiracist homiletics and religious education.

Do you know an Emmanuel grad who is making a significant contribution to society? Nominate them for the 2021 Distinguished Alumni/ae Award. The nomination deadline is December 31, 2021.

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Alumni/ae Service Award

The Emmanuel College Alumni/ae Association developed the Alumni/ae Service Award in 2017 to bring recognition and honour to the noteworthy accomplishments of Emmanuel College Alumni/ae.

Award recipients will be honoured at a future event.

Nominations for the next round of Awards will be accepted until December 31, 2021. 

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