About Us
On Thursday, March 19, 2015, Boston College’s fourth annual Veritas Forum will take place in McGuinn 121. With a focus on engaging multiple different perspectives on national issues, the Veritas Forum—sponsored at Boston College by the St. Thomas More Society and BC Alive-InterVarsity Asian Christian Fellowship—will be bringing together two different speakers on the question, “Can we have Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream without his faith?”
The Veritas Forum is a national organization that strives to bring together a variety of voices on issues of faith and the relevance of Jesus Christ in modern day society. It focuses on organizing events at college campuses across the country in an attempt to raise issues of faith and religion in the lives of young adults. In its fourth year at BC, the Veritas Forum is turning toward the hot-button topic of race. Following the many instances of racial violence that took place in the last year, the focus of the forum could not be more timely. America must re-assess whether or not MLK’s dream of racial harmony is truly coming to fruition in our modern society.
Photo courtesy of Mary Popeo / Facebook
Publicity of the event does not back down from this connection to the violent, virulent race relations of 2014, with flyers for the forum immediately drawing on social media themes from the last few months. The forum reminds students of the issues at hand and of the shocking downturn in the timeline of events following MLK’s transcendent speech on August 28 of 1963: from the hopeful #IHaveADream, to #BlackLivesMatter and finally to #ICantBreathe.
Organized by BC alumna Mary Popeo, A&S ’14, and a group of dedicated current students, the 2015 Veritas Forum will not only bring together students on the topics of race and religion but will heavily integrate the opinions of two prominent Boston-area professors.
The first of the two speakers participating in the forum is Nancy Hill, a Christian professor of education at Harvard University. Her own research focuses on race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status and how they affect parenting beliefs, practices and the lives of young children. Her insight into the topic for this year’s Veritas Forum will most likely intersect the issues of race and religion.
With Hill providing the Christian religious perspective, non-Christian political scientist Alan Wolfe will bring an alternative point of view to the discussion. As a prominent political science professor at BC and the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, Wolfe also has a unique religious-political lens with which to view the events of the past year.
Moderated by Daniel Lyons, an Associate Professor at the Boston College Law School, this year’s Veritas Forum promises to provide a lively discussion about faith, race and the future of our country this Thursday, March 19.
