The Rev. Dr. Andrew P.W. Bennett is Director of Faith Community Engagement at Cardus.

He will speak from the Bimah and during Kiddush.
Return to Me with All Your Heart: Perseverance in Repentance

A champion of religious freedom domestically and internationally, Dr. Bennett served as Canada’s first Ambassador for Religious Freedom and led Global Affairs Canada’s Office of Religious Freedom from 2013 to 2016. He simultaneously served as Canada’s Head of Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. In 2025, he was awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal in recognition of his work. Dr. Bennett holds a PhD in politics (2002) from the University of Edinburgh as well as degrees in history from McGill and Dalhousie Universities.

Dr. Bennett leads Cardus’s engagement with faith communities across Canada on issues such as religious freedom, freedom of conscience, and the importance of public faith to our common life. He also helps to direct Cardus’s program of public theology through the Communio network of Christian young professionals. Dr. Bennett is a senior fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute in Washington, DC.

He is an ordained deacon in the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in the Eparchy (Diocese) of Toronto and Eastern Canada. In addition to his work at Cardus, he enjoys an active parish ministry at St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Shrine in Ottawa, Ontario.