Our world is filled with conflicting messages about beauty.  More and more we are bombarded with images of personal beauty that focus on appearance, weight, and sexuality, and our American culture lusts after this elusive beauty in any way possible.  We all have a sense that there is more to beauty than just what meets the eye, but what is true beauty?  We desire to engage in a conversation about how a faith in God informs a view of beauty in human beings, asking the question: How does the gospel inform your sense of beauty in relation to the self?  Rick McKinley, author of Jesus in the Margins and This Beautiful Mess and pastor of Imago Dei Community Church in Portland, Oregon, and Dr. Lauren Winner, professor at Duke Divinity School and author of Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, and Real Sex, will provide their insights into this interesting question.  We will also have an extensive Q&A session.

Before you come, here are some questions to ponder:

What constitutes a beautiful person?

What critera do others use to define personal beauty?

How do others' definitions affect your own understanding of personal beauty?

Come have breakfast with either Lauren Winner or Rick McKinley!

Lauren will be in the Lowell JCR.

Rick will be in the Coolidge Room (which is next to the Lowell JCR).

Please get breakfast from Lowell dining hall before arriving if you plan to eat.

Directions to Coolidge Room: Walk straight through Lowell house main courtyard. Immediately before reaching the door to the dining hall, turn left under the archway. The Coolidge Room is the first room on the left.

Directions to the Lowell Junior Common Room: Walk straight through Lowell house main courtyard and enter the dining hall wing. Instead of taking a right into the dining hall, take a left to the JCR.

Some questions to ponder:

-Is this world a beautiful place?  By what criteria?

-Should green be the new crimson?

-What responsibilities do we have to the world?

Come join us for an informal breakfast with panelists from Thursday night!  This is a terrific opportunity to continue the conversations in an even more personal venue.  This breakfast will be informal.

Directions to the Lowell Junior Common Room: Walk straight through Lowell house main courtyard and enter the dining hall wing. Instead of taking a right into the dining hall, take a left to the JCR.

Some questions to ponder:

-What does your ideal society look like?

-What is the basis for a beautiful society?

-How can we make the Harvard community more beautiful?

Dave Schmelzer, a local pastor, and the author of the book Not the Religious Type, will offer a fresh perspective and extensive opportunities for Q&A as we consider, together, the nature of a beautiful society.

Come have brunch with Shane Claiborne as he discusses the nature of "a beautiful conversation."  What does it look like for cynics, Christians, agnostics, Muslims, seekers, Jews, atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, and the searching to talk together about faith questions in a beautiful way?  What do Jesus-followers need to repent of and what do they need to embrace if we are all going to carry on a beautiful conversation with one another?  Can faith conversations be life-giving instead of draining, attractive instead of repulsive, beautiful instead of ugly, uniting instead of divisive?  We hope so -- let's try, together, to find a way forward at this capstone event to the 2009 Veritas Forum.