By Dom LoVallo
Managing Editor
St. Bonaventure University hosted its second Agape Latte event of the semester Tuesday night.
Around 7:30, students started filing in to the Reilly Center Café to pick up a free shirt, enter a raffle, grab some snacks and have a cup of coffee or hot chocolate.
Natalie Wasek, a junior accounting major, helped set up the event.
“Agape Latte is a speaker-based program that’s run out of Boston College,” Wasek said. “It’s faith-based, but more of a conversation-based event. It’s coffee and love, ultimately. ‘Agape’ is love. ‘Latte’ is coffee.”
Wasek said she believes Agape Latte is already a success.
“It’s been wonderful so far,” she said. “Our [attendance] has been growing each event, so we’re hoping to continue to grow it. Our numbers have been increasing every time.”
Two more events are planned for next semester.
Freshmen Sean Bradley and Michelle Onofrio performed for the first 30 minutes of Agape Latte. Bradley, a marketing major, sang and Onofrio, a music and psychology double major, played piano and ukulele.
Bradley said he had fun being the opening act and his love for performing made it easy.
“I thought it was pretty fun,” Bradley said. “I enjoy performing whenever I can. It was a good experience. It was a little pressure because everyone was still talking, drinking their coffee while we were doing our thing. So the people who wanted to listen, listened to some nice background music.”
The set included Bradley getting the entire room of over 50 people to sing Happy Birthday to Onofrio.
Every Agape Latte event has a highlighted speaker, and Tuesday it was Fr. Dan Riley, O.F.M. He began his talk reminding the listeners that this was “time to chill.”
“For me all coffee houses are neutral zones,” Riley said. “They’re places of peace, so even from my college years there would be little cafés and coffee houses in Rochester, and there would be art there, but you stepped off of the street into another place. That was a quiet zone and conversation could happen like this one.”
Riley said he wanted to cover the future in his talk because it’s a regular part of all of our lives, whether we are college students or the oldest generation.
“We can face [the future] as exciting [or] as [a] challenge, rather as anxiety-producing, and that’s a shift. The biggest changes always need to happen within us. We can’t change the world always around us, but we can change here,” Riley said, pointing to his heart.
The rest of the talk included stories about Riley’s ex-girlfriend, memories from childhood, memories of working with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and how the Allegheny River “sings to you.”
During his talk, he said, “The wonderful thing is that we’re all welcome [at Bonaventure].” For how the world is today, he said those words are very important for the SBU community.
“The divides are incredible, aren’t they? The union and the ability to support each other are critical in this world, to feel a deep sense of welcome. You’re here. We’re alive,” Riley said. “And for me, one placed us here, but people don’t have to believe that. But I do, but that means we have the opportunity to welcome each other to life.”
Senior political science major J.W. Cook said he loved Riley’s talk.
“Last night’s Agape Latte was one of my favorites so far,” he said. “With tensions as high as they are with the election results, it was reassuring to listen to Fr. Dan [Riley] draw upon his time at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”
lovalldv15@bonaventure.edu
