Every Tuesday at 11:05 a.m., students, faculty, staff and the greater BYU community attend the weekly devotional or forum address. Unless specifically marked below, the devotionals and forums will be held in the BYU Marriott Center.
Most devotionals and forums will be broadcast live on BYUtv, BYUtv.org (and archived for on-demand streaming) and BYUradio and will be archived on speeches.byu.edu.
Please plan to join students and employees each Tuesday at 11:05 a.m. for a truly unique experience as the campus gathers to receive spiritual and temporal edification.
Spring/Summer 2025 Devotional and Forum Schedule
May
- 6 – Hal Boyd, President's Office
- 13 – Salani Pita, Budget Office
- 20 – Sarah Clark, McKay School
June
- 3 – Kent Gee, Distinguished Faculty Lecture (Forum)
- 10 – Richard Houseman, Continuing Education
- 24 – William Clayton, BYU Law
July
- 1 – Dawan Coombs, College of Humanities
- 8 – Brennan Platt, College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences
- 15 – Sherami Jara, College of Humanities
- JSB Auditorium
- 29 – Paul Lambert, Wheatley Institute (Forum)
- JSB Auditorium
August
- 5 – Amy Jex, College of Fine Arts and Communications
- 19 – Elder Gerrit W. Gong, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Education Week)
About the Spring/Summer 2025 Speakers
Hal Boyd
May 6, Devotional
Hal Boyd is the chief of staff to the president of BYU. He previously served as an associate professor and director of public scholarship in BYU’s School of Family Life and as the editor of the Deseret News. Boyd also worked as the special assistant to the president at Eastern Kentucky University.
Since 2018, Boyd has been a fellow of BYU's Wheatley Institute, and his writings on family, religion, higher education and constitutional government have appeared in a variety of venues, including The New York Times, The Atlantic and The National Review. Boyd is a graduate of Yale Law School and BYU, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy with honors.
Salani Pita
May 13, Devotional
Salani Pita joined the financial services department at BYU in November 2022 as an analyst in the budget office. She also serves as a member of the University Belonging Committee and as the project manager for the University Master Safety Plan.
Pita was born and raised in Tutuila, American Samoa as one of 12 children. She played tennis for the University of Hawaii at Manoa for three years before transferring to BYU, where she received a bachelor’s degree in accounting.
Sarah Clark
May 20, Devotional
Sarah Clark is the dean of the McKay School of Education at BYU. For more than 30 years, she has been involved in the field of education in a variety of roles, including classroom teacher, curriculum developer, author, editor, instructional coach, consultant, researcher and university professor. Her research explores ways to strengthen the student experience and the intersection between the student, a teacher’s pedagogy and the curriculum.
Clark earned a doctorate in curriculum and instruction, with a specialization in teacher education and literacy instruction from Utah State University. She received a master's degree in education with a specialization in language, reading and culture, and earned a bachelor's degree in elementary education from the University of Arizona.
Kent Gee
June 3, Forum
Kent Gee, professor of physics and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is a Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Fellow at BYU. He joined the faculty at BYU after completing his doctorate in acoustics at Penn State University in 2005.
His primary research characterizes high-amplitude noise sources and fields through data analysis and imaging methods. His research group, the Physics and Aerospace Student-Centered Acoustics Laboratory (PASCAL), has published over 120 articles and proceedings papers in these areas. He has made and analyzed extensive near and far-field measurements of military aircraft, rockets and space vehicles.
Richard Houseman
June 10, Devotional
Richard Houseman is the dean of Continuing Education at BYU. He has also served as the worldwide manager of missionary in-field services for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and as a mission leader in the Brazil Recife Mission. Before coming to BYU, he spent many years in academia as a professor of entomology at the University of Missouri, a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University and adjunct faculty at both Blinn College and Utah Valley University.
Houseman earned a doctorate in entomology from Texas A&M University, a master’s degree in zoology from BYU and bachelor’s degrees in biology and secondary education, also from BYU.
William Clayton
June 24, Devotional
Will Clayton is a professor and associate dean at BYU's J. Reuben Clark Law School. His research focuses on corporate and securities law, with an emphasis on the law and policy of private equity and private investment funds. In recent years, his work has been cited in federal securities rule-making, comment letters and amicus briefs relating to private funds and he has been invited to present his research to national policymakers and leading industry organizations. Clayton also currently serves as a co-director of BYU's Global Business Law Program.
Before BYU, Clayton practiced corporate law in New York City and was an executive director at the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law. He holds a juris doctor from Yale Law School, an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a bachelor's degree from Stanford University.
Dawan Coombs
July 1, Devotional
Dawan Coombs is an associate professor of English at BYU. She received her bachelor’s degree in English teaching from BYU. She then earned her master's degree from the University of Utah and her doctorate in language and literacy education from the University of Georgia.
She researches adolescent literacy and struggling readers, teacher education, Bakhtinian theory and dialogic teaching. Her teaching interests are reading and literature pedagogy and adolescent literature.
Brennan Platt
July 8, Devotional
Brennan Platt is a professor of economics at BYU. He received bachelor's degrees in economics and mathematics from Arizona State University in 2001, and earned a master's and doctorate in economics from the University of Minnesota in 2006. He loves teaching theory courses in economics as well as introducing students to economic thinking in Econ 110.
His research focuses on settings where search effort is needed to gather information on relevant options, such as job hunting, housing, online auctions, and dating. He also studies how state foster care rules affect children in care.
Sherami Jara
July 15, Devotional
Sherami Jara joined BYU nearly 15 years ago after spending a decade working in policy and career development for the state of Utah. Currently, she serves as an assistant dean in the College of Humanities and the director of the Liberal Arts Advisement and Careers Center, where she oversees career readiness efforts for approximately 7,200 students across two liberal arts colleges.
Sherami holds both a bachelor's degree in English and a master’s degree in public administration from BYU.
Paul Lambert
July 29, Forum
Paul Lambert is the religion initiative director at the Wheatley Institute. He is a leading expert on religious pluralism in society, including the role of pluralism in economics and business. Prior, Lambert was an assistant dean at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
Lambert also worked at the National Defense University, where he served as professor and lead academic officer of a congressionally-funded Department of Defense and Department of State American Studies graduate program. He earned a doctorate in liberal studies from Georgetown University, a master's degree in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from BYU. He also attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he graduated from the Seminar XXI Program on foreign affairs and national security.
Amy Jex
August 5, Devotional
Amy Jex is an associate teaching professor in the BYU Department of Dance. She currently serves as an associate chair of the department and artistic director of BYU Traditionz, a cultural dance outreach performance ensemble.
Some of her favorite courses to teach are Ukrainian dance, dance history and classes within the BYU International Folk Dance program. One of the best parts of her career is the opportunity to interact with and learn from people all over the world as they impart their cultural dance traditions.
Elder Gerrit W. Gong
August 19, Devotional
Elder Gerrit W. Gong currently serves as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He previously served as a member of the Asia Area Presidency and member of the Presidency of the Seventy.
During his 20 years in Washington, D.C., he served as special assistant to the undersecretary of state at the U.S. State Department, as special assistant to the U.S. ambassador in Beijing, China, and in several positions at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He was also assistant to the president for planning and assessment at BYU.
Elder Gong holds a doctorate in international relations and a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar. He also holds a bachelor's degree in Asian and university studies from BYU.
