Join the McMaster University Department of Family Medicine for the 2024 Hooker Lecture with Pádraig Ó Tuama — an Irish poet, with interests in language, violence, power and religion. Pádraig will guide us toward new possibilities as we seek to reclaim the heart of health care, remember what draws people to this work, find inspiration to stay the course and be agents of change.

This free public lecture is open to everyone.

October 30, 2024
5:30 to 7:30 p.m. — refreshments from 4:30 to 5:30
David Braley Health Sciences Centre
100 Main St. West, Hamilton
or online

Register to join

More about Pádraig
Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, conflict resolution mediator and the author of Kitchen Hymns (2025), Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love (2024), Poetry Unbound (2022), Feed the Beast (2022), Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community (2017), In the Shelter (2015), Sorry for your Troubles (2013), and Readings from the Books of Exile (2012), which was longlisted for the 2013 Polari First Book Prize.

About his most recent collection of poems, Feed the Beast, Jericho Brown says, “This book is unashamed about poetry’s relationship to the spirit. I would go as far as saying this book is one way we know poetry is prayer.” His memoir, In the Shelter, interweaves everyday stories with narrative theology, gospel reflections with mindfulness, and Celtic spirituality with poetry for a memoir that relates ideas of shelter and welcome to journeys of life.

Eliza Griswold wrote in a New Yorker profile of Pádraig that for him, poetry is “the language the heart speaks not when it reaches for some externalized divinity but when it seeks to understand itself.”

Here are some suggested “small bites” for what promises to be a memorable feast:
The Facts of Life (read by Pádraig)
How to be Alone (read by Pádraig) 

And for a more substantial serving:
With Wisdom for Living Now, (Poetry Unbound Podcast, with Krista Tippett)