Junior Preston Vicenzi will be part of an inaugural peace speech contest to be held at Goshen (Ind.) College later this month.
Vicenzi, Newton, will be at GC Sept. 19-20 for the first Peace Talks, along with four other students from Mennonite/Anabaptist colleges in the United States and Canada.
As a project of More Than Just Stories, a five-year project at GC funded by a Lilly grant, Peace Talks is a new annual public speaking event for young people that aims to cultivate leadership through faith-based speaking and storytelling about peace and justice.
The competition will be held Sept. 19 at 7 p.m. in the Umble Center on the Goshen College campus. It is free and open to the public, and will be available via livestreaming at peacetalkscontest.org (link will open 10 minutes before the event begins).
Participants will deliver 8- to 10-minute speeches on topics of their choosing that relate to peace and justice. Cash awards for the speakers for 2026 are $1,000, first place; $800, second place; $600, third place.
Vicenzi’s speech is entitled “The Second Crusade: The Iran War’s Dangerous Myth of Redemptive Violence.” He is majoring in political science and history, and communication arts.
Other speakers are: Katherine Brown, Tabor College, Hillsboro (“The Woman on the Corner: Prostitutes are People, Too”); Caoimhe Farrell, Goshen College (“Screens and Society: Building Our Lives Around Each Other Instead of Technology”); Mateo Gonzalez, Hesston College (“More than a Sentence: Exploring Restorative Justice”); and Sophia Kauffman, Conrad Grebel University College, Waterloo, Ontario (“Sitting with Our Shame: Facing the History of Mennonite Residential Schools”).
See more about the contest and the five speakers at peacetalkscontest.org or the Peace Talks Facebook page.
The students will be evaluated by a panel of independent judges: Dr. Anug Gurung, Gladdys E. Muir assistant professor of peace studies at Manchester University, North Manchester, Ind.; Dr. Gariot Louima, chief of staff and vice president for equal opportunity and compliance at Earlham College, Richmond, Ind.; and Dr. Amy Lindeman Allen, associate professor of New Testament at Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis.
The weekend will include workshops for the students and their accompanying faculty or staff, speech coaching from local seminary faculty, and time to connect through shared meals and other activities.
The first year of Peace Talks is by invitation only to participating C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical institutions.
In the second year (2027), students at faith-based schools in Indiana will be invited to participate; in the third year (2028), students at any Indiana college or university can apply; and in the fourth year (2029), students from colleges and universities across the nation will be eligible.
Peace Talks extends and expands the model of the C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest, in which students at Mennonite colleges and universities have competed annually for decades, delivering speeches at their respective campuses. Vicenzi placed second in Bethel’s C. Henry Smith contest last spring.
Peace Talks will be a discrete opportunity, not intended to replace the campus contests or the binational C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest managed by Mennonite Central Committee.
More Than Just Stories is a new media hub made possible through a five-year, $5 million faith and storytelling grant to Goshen College from Lilly Endowment, Inc.
Contact mtroyer@goshen.edu with questions and media inquiries.
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel is ranked #25 in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Regional College Midwest for 2026. Bethel was the only Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Community Healing and Transformation (TCHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see www.bethelks.edu
