Bob Haverluck

Bob Haverluck is a Manitoba artist-educator and theologian who works with community groups using the arts to help engage issues of violence against the earth and her creatures. His 2017 publication When God Was Flesh and Wild: Stories in Defence of the Earth combines his playful retelling of earth attentive narratives with numerous drawings. The recently completed manuscript Heartening: Encouraging Mother Earth’s Weary Lovers (with philosopher activist Kathleen Moore) combines essays and drawings that attend to the wrecking of the spirit along with the watery animally earth. This January to March an art exhibit, Mother Earth and Her Lovers: repair and maintenance featured forty of Bob’s drawings and a series of events he helped animate using story, song, poetry and political reflections. His present work focus is turning his play The Court Case of the Creatures: The Famous Lake Winnipeg Trial into story form with a host of drawings.

Bob’s drawings have appeared in books of economics, psychology, social action and liberation theology and also in journals, including Harpers, New Statesman, This Magazine. From 2000-2007 Bob had a drawing column in  ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies. Prior to that, he was an editorial cartoonist for Ploughshares Monitor and for Canadian Dimension. Bob’s drawing has long been combined with his work teaching courses in biblical studies, the arts and social action. He has taught as a sessional lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at the University of Winnipeg . More recently, he served a two year period as as artist-in-residence at the University of Winnipeg. Bob’s use of visual art, storytelling and poetry has been basic to his work in the academy, parish, and community. In the last decade, these arts have been vehicles for his leading and facilitating several year long arts-based community projects attending to the watery animally earth. Bob regularly leads conferences and workshops from Victoria B.C to Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. Many are co-led with Cree elder Stanley McKay under the banner of ‘Renewing Our Peace Treaty with the Earth’.