Luke Burgis is a successful entrepreneur, a certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, and now a seminarian for the Diocese of Las Vegas. Before he entered St. John's Seminary, Luke was the founder of ActivPrayer, a popular faith-based fitness movement.
After graduating from New York University’s Stern School of Business, Luke went on to work at major Wall Street investment banks (Morgan Stanley and Citigroup) and a venture capital firm. His career in corporate finance took him from New York to Thailand and Hong Kong. Just as his career was taking off, he quit his job to start a wellness company with his cousin.
Luke’s companies – Healthy Vending and Fit Fuel – were started out of a spare bedroom in a Hollywood apartment. One of them grew to over $15 million in value in just four years. He was named “One of the Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under the Age of 25” in America by Business Week magazine in 2006. Despite the success, he later went through a bankruptcy with the same company.
Luke was the founder and now an advisor to ActivPrayer, an organization that designs faith-based fitness programs that help people achieve their fitness goals by addressing all four dimensions of the human person – physical, spiritual, mental and emotional. ActivPrayer fitness professionals and clergy often provide workshops and motivational seminars to get people on the road to optimizing their health by taking a spiritual approach to it.
Luke is currently attending St. John’s Seminary in Camarillio, CA. He does the following talk topics and more:
God Loves Football - the sporting spirit, analogies between sports and the spiritual life, tactics and disciplines
Christianity in the Workplace - vocational discernment, how to live out our our faith in the world
Towards a Happy Church - the church exists for our happiness; why so many sour faced Catholics?
The Engine of Sex, Food, & Money - how are we supposed to deal with marketing messages and the modern world as Christian?
A Theology of Health - "A Theology of Health: Can we apply Theology of the Body to health and wellness? Can being healthy help us be holy?
