Forum Focuses on Love

Harvard students and alumni gathered to discuss themes of love and Christianity during the Veritas Forum’s three day seminar and lecture series held on campus this past weekend.

This year’s forum, whose teaser posters questioned “Where is the love?” featured several speakers who discussed topics including ‘Jesus and our Sexuality,’ ‘Loving Our Parents,’ and ‘A Christian View of Relationships.’

Jacob L. Bryant ’07, the director of this year’s forum, said last spring’s Crimson report on depression among students got him thinking that the campus would benefit from discussions about the theme of love.

Nahye Hwang ’05, who has attended all the forums since her sophomore year, said this year’s forum “asked questions people are actually interested in.”

“There aren’t enough things like this on campus,” she said, adding that the forum focused on posing “questions that are important to people and not just for the sake of gaining knowledge.”

“It was a good thread that ran through everything,” said Patti Ghubril, who, with her husband Saleem, led a seminar entitled “How to be a Great Lover: Communication in Relationships.”

Although in the past the forum has mainly been academic, bringing in professors or authors to speak, this year’s forum attempted to stimulate discussion on both the intellectual and personal level, Bryant said.

“We are simply intrigued with this love that Christ offered, and we want to have a conversation—not a monologue—about it,” Bryant wrote in an e-mail.

A group of Harvard graduate students founded The Veritas Forum in 1992 and have worked to spread the organization to several other university campuses nationwide. This year, 36 schools held forums with discussion topics and speakers of their choosing.

The Harvard Forum tries to address both Christian and non-Christian audiences, according to Bryant.

“We hope everything was engaging, interesting and accessible to anyone,” he said.

Hwang said she saw the forums as an opportunity to invite her non-Christian friends to explore Christianity.

One such friend, Christina A. Fields ’05, who said she was “at a stage of figuring things out before deciding on [her] theology,” attended a seminar with Hwang. She said she was able to “talk to other Christians, ask questions and push it further into discussion.”

She added that she thought the forum was geared towards “trying to be more philosophical and open to different interpretations” to accommodate non-Christian attendees.

Ted K. Lim ’06, a Christian, said he felt the message of a seminar he attended “resonated with you, whether you subscribe to Christianity or not.”

—Staff writer Victoria Kim can be reached at vkim@fas.harvard.edu.