The Symposium is spiritual, but not the way you might think. It's personal stories from students, educators, and professionals. They're working on questions like, "Why am I here?" and "What is the meaning in my life?", because they've accepted that there's more here than can be captured in a passing glance. They all have a reason to keep active watch. Some of them have to live on the edge to keep watch on life, some of them seem to be caught off-guard by it in simple moments of grace, and some of our contributors have their searching down to a science-postulate an answer to "who am I?" or "what is the life worth living?" then go out and test it.

Maybe none of them have The Secret, but they all have their ways.

The reflections inside the magazine come from experiences that actually happened to us, not just things we read about. The Symposium is for people who want to take a "see for yourself" approach to spirituality, philosophy, and life, instead of taking someone else's word.

The Symposium is completely student-run, nationally distributed, and constantly evolving. We've added interviews; a Stake Out column that features contributors checking out spiritual practices, groups, or events for themselves; and themes. We now offer free one-year subscriptions to students, and we've gotten tremendous support (through grants, sponsorships, and general subscriptions) to make sure we can keep meeting the demand. We're getting submissions from across the country from students and adults who want to be a part of the action. We've gone from an eight-page, Kinko's-copied newsletter to a twenty-some-page magazine with a flashy color cover. The Symposium was even featured in the Winter 2000 issue of Spirituality and Health, and received a full-page feature in the Durham-Herald Sun.

No one expected this to happen. The Symposium was originally just meant for students in the Self Knowledge Symposium chapters at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University. We wanted to share our stories, thoughts, and experiences on the spiritual journey, and a cover-less, color-less newsletter a few pages long seemed the simplest way to do it. The Symposium was never intended to leave the meeting places of the three student groups, let alone go national. But then, a few things happened.

We sent copies of The Symposium to many of our friends around the country, and they loved it. "I just finished the really magnificent Vol. I, no. 1 issue of The Symposium. It's stunning! Genuinely first-rate and grabs and holds the attention," Father Christian Carr, former abbot of Mepkin Abbey Monastery, wrote in.

What really got things rolling, though, was when a few of our members attended the first-ever Education as Transformation Conference at Wellesley College in Boston. The purpose of the conference was to bring educators, ministers, and administrators together to talk about how they could address the growing spiritual hunger among university students. A few hundred people were expected, but over 800 people showed up. It was a madhouse, and it was fantastic.

That was when we realized what incredible potential The Symposium had to bring students and adults together in a national, student-run magazine. Young people all over the country are searching for God, searching for meaning, and searching, looking past the assumptions they were raised with and the culture surrounding them, for a life worth living. Yet it's not something they can talk about in their classrooms or at most of the parties they go to.

So we started contacting people from the Education as Transformation Conference to let them know about The Symposium, we began distributing more widely on the North Carolina Triangle campuses, and the response we received was overwhelming. In just over a year and a half, we went from a couple of hundred copies amongst ourselves to a distribution of over two-thousand copies all across the country, and even around the world.

But you still don't know anything about us until you've stepped inside...