Veritas Forum

Forums

To plan a Forum, Veritas partners with Christian student groups, who organize and host the Forum, typically co-sponsored by other student organizations and academic departments. Typical events include evening keynote addresses, workshops, debates, and discussions. Common topics include the existence of God; the relationship between science and religion; social justice work; questions of social ethics; feminism and women's issues; questions of meaning or purpose in human life, evil, or beauty; human sexuality and relationships; the existence of objective truth; religion and art; Christianity and popular culture; and the historical validity of the Bible.

Kelly Monroe Kullberg founded the organization, The Veritas Forum, but has not had any affiliation with it since 2016.

The Veritas Forum has hosted several discussion events with prominent speakers representing secular or non-Christian points of view, including Peter Singer, Steven Pinker, Antony Flew, Christopher Hitchens, Shelly Kagan, Alan Lightman, and Jeffrey Sachs.

Recent discussion events include the following: the 2009 Veritas Forum at MIT with atheist philosopher Peter Singer, Christian philosophical theologian John E. Hare, and philosopher and religious scholar Eric Gregory; the 2010 Veritas Forum in the Sheldonian Theatre of the University of Oxford, with atheist and journalist Christopher Hitchens alongside Catholic philosopher and ethicist John Joseph Haldane; and the 2010 Veritas Forum at UCLA with Christian mathematician and apologist John Lennox being interviewed by UCLA Law Professor Daniel Lowenstein.

History

The first forum took place at Harvard University in 1986, and was organized as an academic conference in Christian apologetics. Peter Gomes, Harvard's campus minister, participated in the forum in 1986. The Forum's name derives from Harvard's motto, Veritas, meaning Truth. Harvard's motto reflects the school's Christian heritage: although it is popularly trimmed to the one word Veritas, it officially reads "Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae," or Truth for Christ and the Church. With this name, Veritas seeks to remind the university community of the centrality of Christ to its founding. At the first Veritas Forum writers of the book Finding God at Harvard gathered to share their own questions, sufferings, journeys, and discoveries with the Harvard community.

After its first forum at Harvard, Veritas Forums spread to the University of Michigan, Ohio State, the University of Virginia, Yale and eventually across the country to Berkeley, Stanford, UC Davis, and UCLA.

France had its first Veritas Forum in 2006; England and the Netherlands in 2007; Macedonia in 2010. In the academic year 2010-2011, Forums were held at over forty American institutions of higher education. To date, over 400 speakers have presented at a Veritas event, representing a variety of disciplines and worldviews.

Past speakers

Christian speakers

Denis Alexander - Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St Edmund's College, Cambridge

Justin L. Barrett - psychologist and member of the Thrive Center for Human Development

Jeremy Begbie - scholar of Christianity and the arts at Duke Divinity School

Craig Blomberg - American New Testament scholar at Denver Seminary

Mia Chung - pianist, and professor of Interpretive Analysis at Curtis Institute of Music

Francis Collins - American physicist-geneticist, former head of the Human Genome Project

Caroline Cox - member of the British House of Lords and CEO of the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust

William Lane Craig - American apologist, theologian, analytic philosopher and professor at Talbot School of Theology

Marla Frederick - professor of African-American Studies and the Study of Religion at Harvard University

Robert P. George - professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University

Owen Gingerich - professor of astronomy and the history of science at Harvard University

Os Guinness - noted author and apologist

Gary Habermas - American philosopher of religion

William Hurlbut - physician and consulting professor in the Neuroscience Institute at Stanford University

Non-Christian speakers

Colin Adams - mathematician, author, and professor at Williams College

Dan Barker - American atheist and former Christian preacher

Akeel Bilgrami - Indian-born philosopher of language and mind

Sean M. Carroll - American physicist and theoretical cosmologist

Veena Das - professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University

David Eisenbach - historian and professor at Columbia University

Antony Flew - British philosopher of religion and former atheist

Marcelo Gleiser - Brazilian physicist at Dartmouth College, astronomer, and author of A Tear at the Edge of Creation

Garrett Hardin - American ecologist, coiner of the phrase "tragedy of the commons," professor at University of California at Santa Barbara

David Helfand - chair of the Astronomy department at Columbia University

Christopher Hitchens - British author, journalist, and advocate of atheism

Donald Hubin - professor of philosophy at Ohio State University

Shelly Kagan - professor of philosophy at Yale University

Nicholas D. Kristof - American journalist and winner of two Pulitzer prizes

Books and media

Veritas Forum recordings are freely available on the Veritas website.

Veritas Forum Books seek to provide "academically engaging, culturally relevant and distinctively Christian points of view" to the public. Current titles include the following:

A Place for Truth edited by Dallas Willard, published in the fall of 2010

The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath

Finding Calcutta by Mary Poplin

Did the Resurrection Happen? featuring a discussion between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew