The Veritas Forum

Is God necessary for morality?

Is there hope in a hopeless world?

Are there real reasons for belief in God?

Is DNA a 'language of God'?

These are big questions, and in past generations, the university was the place for young people to work out their perspectives on the big questions of life. However, as times have changed, so has our educational system, and most university degree programs are aimed primarily at professional training rather than worldview development. Students and even faculty are left without a place to engage the biggest questions, being bogged down with exam questions.

I've seen this at work over and over again. It is saddening to talk to a random university student and discover that he or she has not thought about God as an idea, let alone a loving person in ages, nor has he or she thought about how to orient one's moral compass or if there is more to human existence than the material world. 

Enter the Veritas Forum. This group began in 1992 at Harvard where they noticed the lack of conversation regarding the issues of life, morality, ethics, God and eternity. They recruited Christian apologists and ministers, and alumni from professional fields across the spectrum to come speak to various audiences at Harvard with the hopes of jump-starting these necessary conversations. This one-time forum has developed into an international movement, and Tulane's working on getting on board.

I got excited about Veritas as I heard about some of the results at UMass and Stanford where Chi Alpha was a part of hosting Veritas. They brought in Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project to speak about the marriage of science and faith within his own life. These talks brought out hundreds of students and faculty! 

-read about the Stanford event

Tulane is full of biology and chemistry students, bio-chemical engineering students, and more. Many of these students look up to a scientist like Dr. Collins as a great hero, and I'm excited about the possibility of bringing someone like him to Tulane.

Over the past two months, I have been researching Veritas, and now have recruited a team at Tulane representing nearly all of the Christian communities on campus, and we are moving forward to plan a Veritas Forum for Tulane. Our target date is spring of 2009.