Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Keast, Ron
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Description area
Dates of existence
History
Dr. Ronald Keast earned his B.A., M.A., and in 1974 his Ph.D. from the Department of Religion at McMaster University. The subject of his doctoral thesis and subsequently published work was The Effects of the Technique and Technology of Communications on Religion in the West.
Dr. Keast has over forty years’ experience in television broadcasting and education in Canada. After early years as a television writer, director and producer, he served as General Manager of programming at the Ontario provincial educational television service, TVOntario, Chair of the School of Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto, and then, from 1987 to 2005, President and Chief Executive Officer of the national multifaith and multicultural television channel, Vision TV, (1987/1994), and of Access Media Group (1994/2005), a television and multimedia learning company that owned and operated three national and one regional television specialty channels – Canadian Learning Television (CLT), BookTelevision, Court TV Canada, ACCESS Alberta - and an educational multimedia distribution company.
Following his retirement as President and CEO of Access Media Group in 2005, Dr. Keast became engaged in research and writing about science, philosophy and religion. This resulted in the 2009 publication of his book, Dancing in the Dark, The "Waltz in Wonder" of Quantum Metaphysics.
In 2008, he was appointed Chair of the Advisory Board of CARP – A New Vision of Aging for Canada. In 2009, he became a shareholder and Chair of the Board of Canada's largest educational multimedia distribution company, Distribution Access.