While most Duke students catch up on work and sleep during fall break, one group of students will be heading to North Carolina State University to attend the first Inward Bound Conference.
The event, which runs Sunday through Tuesday, is the brainchild of the Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation, a spirituality network founded in 1989. SKSF is run primarily by students at four universities in North Carolina, including Duke, and the Education as Transformation Project, a spirituality academic group founded at Wellesley College in 1996.
Sponsored primarily by the Duke Chapel and the John Templeton Foundation, the conference will bring about 300 students from as far as British Columbia, Canada, together for the three-day event.
Although the primary emphases of the conference will be experiential learning and discussing spirituality, there will also be ample time for personal self-reflection and networking with the other participants.
"This conference is a great example of the phenomenal spirituality present today in many college students," said Will Willimon, dean of the Chapel, who will be among those attending from Duke. "It is a great opportunity to spread the spiritual activity present here at Duke to other students from around the country."
Willimon, who used to be the adviser to Duke's SKSF chapter, will also deliver the closing prayer at the conference. He will be joined at N.C. State by other spiritual leaders, including David Scott, chancellor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Jon Dalton, director of the Center for the Study of College Student Values at Florida State University.
Additionally, the conference boasts a roster of seven speakers, including Rabbi Niles Goldstein, who is a New York Police Department chaplain and a former Ground Zero counselor, and August Turak, the keynote speaker and SKSF founder.
In total, seven Duke students, many of whom are affiliated with SKSF, will attend the conference. The Duke chapter of SKSF, founded in 1994, currently meets each Tuesday night to discuss issues of spiritual self-evaluation and reflection.
"We as a group expect to gain a greater understanding of what we are doing here by observing what other groups at different universities are doing," said senior Andrea Oland, president of the Duke SKSF chapter. "This conference will also help us show other places, that don't have similar groups, what we're doing here.... We hope that what we learn will be applied to our everyday lives."
Oland is also a senior associate photography editor for The Chronicle.
Although this is the first Inward Bound Conference, similar events have taken place recently, such as one at Wellesley College.
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