Franciscan Talks

Texts allow us to hear the voices of the past!Who

Greetings! I'm Julie, former Catholic Campus Minister at Wake Forest, and 2009 graduate of The Franciscan Institute, part of St. Bonaventure University. I am one of five people to graduate from this program this year. My classmates include a young man who is joining the Franciscan friars this fall and three Franciscan nuns who returned to India to share what they learned with their sisters. My goal is to share what I have learned about Francis and his followers with other people, through a wide variety of settings. One day, I would like to visit the schools of Franciscan study in India and Kenya to give talks, in the footsteps of my friend Sr. Kathy Ganiel, OSF, who has developed a series of talks on the Franciscan Intellectual Tradition which she has given around the world. To begin with, I would like to do this in and around North Carolina. I have a lot of experience in leading talks and designing retreats and I look forward to gaining even more experience in the next year.

Talks & interactive conversations about Francis of Assisi, his followers and the movement he started 800 years ago. My style is one in which I will talk for part of the time, and there will be plenty of time for discussion as a group as well as small-group discussions.

Here are just some of the possible venues

• Retreats
• A Talk at Lunchtime
• Youth Group Meetings
• In a classroom
• Secular Franciscan meetings
• A reenewal & rejuvenation day for your church staff
• Let's be creative!
  

You choose the location. A church hall, a classroom, your living room. I am able to adapt these talks for small and large crowds & I can work with whatever limitations or bonuses the space offers. If you have a projector, then we'll use power point. If you don't want to spend $2 on electricity that night, we'll light an oil lamp. :) You will coordinate the place and gather the participants and together, we will determine the topics and format.

I serve on campus at Wake Forest and at Salem College in Winston-Salem and am able to travel throughout the Diocese & throughout North Carolina to give talks.  We'll be creative: perhaps you want the talk to be part of a lunch series, or part of a Secular Franciscans' meeting. Maybe two evenings in a row one week, or every Tuesday night for five weeks, as a series.

After five summers of rigorous study and a year of thesis-writing, I prayerfully wondered again and again, why am I dedicating so much time and energy to Franciscan Studies. This is a question which I asked through prayer as early as 2003, while I walked the Pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela in Spain and re-read an FAQ sheet the Franciscan Institute had sent me. This is a question I asked at the start of every summer as I anticipated the hard work ahead of me. In prayer, I heard an unequivocal answer to my query and one which settles peacefully within me. My purpose for studying Franciscan history, sources and spirituality is so that I can share it with other people. It is as simple as that.

Contact me through email to start. There are no fees.