Photo by PeterThoeny

InterVarsity GFM Staff Worker Wendy Quay shares about the 4th year of Passion Talks, organized by GFM fellowships in California, and encourages other groups to give it a try. 

On August 22, Stanford IV Grad and the UC Berkeley grad fellowship convened Passion Talks 2015, our third Bay Area Passion Talks conference. Passion Talks are short talks about our work and research from our perspective of faith. This year, 22 grad students, faculty and some from industry, from Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis and Sacramento State, and Google shared their thoughts and reflections on how their faith informs their work and vice versa. Dave Vosburg of Harvey Mudd gave the opening plenary, and I gave the closing plenary. Podcasts of the talks are here – http://pt15.passiontalks.org/program/

Interested in running something similar in your group? Don’t be distracted by the format of the conference! Passion Talks are simple to do in InterVarsity grad or faculty chapters or other groups – Stanford does them in large group each year – and they’re a great way to challenge students, faculty and staff alike to think through in detail and then articulate how our faith and work inform and intersect with each other. We’ve also found that when students give talks, it’s easy for them to invite their non-Christian friends to come listen. So give them a try!

Image: Stanford Campus