{"id":241,"date":"2007-08-07T19:57:33","date_gmt":"2007-08-07T19:57:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/index-12\/phi-beta-kappa-4-19-07\/"},"modified":"2013-02-26T16:21:24","modified_gmt":"2013-02-26T22:21:24","slug":"phi-beta-kappa-4-19-07","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/public-remarks\/phi-beta-kappa-4-19-07\/","title":{"rendered":"Phi Beta Kappa Address"},"content":{"rendered":"

Responding to the Virginia Tech Tragedy
\nApril 19, 2007<\/p>\n

Good evening.\u00a0 I am honored to be invited to address the Delta of Minnesota chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at our college, and I extend my heartiest congratulations to our new members.\u00a0 Your election to Phi Beta Kappa recognizes academic achievement of the highest order at one of America\u2019s leading liberal arts colleges.\u00a0 You should be proud of your accomplishment as are your professors and mentors, your family, and your friends.\u00a0 Election to Phi Beta Kappa recognizes not just good grades but also the qualities and habits of mind that have made you stand out at St. Olaf and that will carry you forward in the years to come\u2014a questioning intellect, a disciplined mind, a catholic range of interests.\u00a0 These gifts will enrich your professional lives and your personal development.\u00a0 Nourish them, for they are the keys to happiness and fulfillment.<\/p>\n

I was going to speak this evening about a passage at the beginning of Act V of Shakespeare\u2019s play A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, in which Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, makes a compelling case for the role of imagination in the life of the mind.\u00a0 But the shootings at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg have changed all that.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want the evening of your Phi Beta Kappa initiation to be depressing, but it seems necessary to acknowledge the violence that has marred the end of the academic year there and on every American campus, wrought sorrow across our nation, and wounded the very imagination about which I had planned to speak. \u00a0What can be said about lyric poetry, or the motets of Palestrina, or the paintings of Tiepolo, or for that matter, the human genome project, or global warming, or geopolitics or anything else in the face of this cataclysmic instance of human brokenness?\u00a0 More specifically, for the Delta of Minnesota chapter of Phi Beta Kappa\u2014a society devoted to learning at a college of the church\u2014how do we think about what we have experienced in these past few days?\u00a0 How do we repair our wounds?\u00a0 Here are my reflections.<\/p>\n

We must grieve.\u00a0 The depth and extent of the pain and suffering felt tonight by the friends and families both of the victims and of the gunman in the Blacksburg shootings surely passes our understanding.\u00a0 How terrible it must feel to be the parent or the friend or the lover of a student or faculty member whose life was so suddenly, so arbitrarily and so violently taken on Monday. How full to bursting with sorrow their hearts must be.\u00a0 In some grim cosmic equation, it appears from history that the human capacity to bear suffering just equals the human capacity to inflict pain, but this is surely an aspect of our existence that we do not understand.\u00a0 There is a sublime majesty visible in the pain of human suffering.\u00a0 We see it portrayed in Greek tragedy, revealed in Scripture, displayed in human history, and\u2014now\u2014experienced in Virginia.\u00a0 But that sublimity and majesty neither explains nor erases the pain of individuals.\u00a0 Their suffering leaves us in awe\u2014speechless, overwhelmed, silent.<\/p>\n

We must cultivate the humility that will allow our minds, our hearts, and our imaginations to recover from the wounds of these events.\u00a0 This is particularly important work for the learned, for most of us who have excelled academically are accustomed to praise and deference.\u00a0 But a liberal arts degree does not confer moral stature nor does it guarantee insight.\u00a0 Neither does a law degree, a medical degree, or a Ph.D.\u00a0 The learned are as personally flawed as everyone else, perhaps more so because their training has given them greater ability to inflict pain in argument, and specialization often has the effect of narrowing one\u2019s vision. The truth is that while we can master an academic discipline to a greater or lesser extent we do not fully understand most things. \u00a0\u00a0Sin remains a mystery.\u00a0 The sources and manifestations of evil confound us.\u00a0 We cannot explain suffering.\u00a0 We have not plumbed the human heart.\u00a0 We still struggle to understand how disease, pain, \u00a0suffering and violence comport with our vision of a benevolent and powerful God.\u00a0 An event like the shootings at Virginia Tech lays bare the limitations and shortcomings of our understanding and points us on a path to quiet reflection rather than quick conclusions or pronouncements.\u00a0 This is not a time for punditry.<\/p>\n

At the same time, we must act.\u00a0 Humility need not engender quiescence.\u00a0 We may not understand sin or suffering, but neither are we propelled in dark ignorance toward some unknown fate.\u00a0 The robust Lutheran theology of vocation reminds us that each of us has been created for the purpose of doing<\/em> something and doing it well to the glory of God, not indulging in passivity.\u00a0\u00a0 Every instance of human evil or error should propel us towards inquiry and reflection.\u00a0 What can we learn from science about the wellsprings of human behavior, from philosophy and theology about pain and suffering and the universe of mind and heart that we occupy?\u00a0 How can history help us navigate our future?\u00a0 How can literature and the arts help us understand our situation, respond to our joys and sorrow, nourish the bonds that hold us in community?\u00a0 Phi Beta Kappa, by promoting liberal learning and by celebrating excellence in scholarship, encourages us to believe that we can make advances in human knowledge, that we can address the ills of our condition, that learning matters.\u00a0 Membership in this society invests us with the responsibility to use our gifts and our energies to good purpose.<\/p>\n

We must reach out.\u00a0 Dean of Students Greg Kneser sent an eloquent and deeply felt message to the St. Olaf campus on the morning of the shootings in which he reminded us that \u201cThere are no easy answers here.\u00a0 What we do provide is community that expects mutual support of each other, \u00a0that celebrates daily life, that bears on, and that works to serve as an example of civility and caring\u00a0 . . . .\u00a0 Tomorrow, as every day, we have Chapel.\u00a0 We have each other, and we have our extended families.\u00a0 In each of these, we can find community, comfort and a sense of security that is more lasting than locks and hardware.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 This was well said.\u00a0 We are sustained in the midst of suffering and in the knowledge of our limitations by the web of relationships that links us to one another and by the countless interactions we share everyday with family, friends, and colleagues that affirm our interconnectedness, express our love, affection, or\u00a0 regard for others, and that buoy them in their daily journey.\u00a0 Community sustains and heals.\u00a0 The shootings at Virginia Tech should impel us to come together, as we have here tonight, not to despair alone.\u00a0 The strength and resilience of our community distinguishes our college.\u00a0 The hand-hewn structure that houses the memorial wind chimes located in the heart of campus gives presence to our ability to find strength and beauty in the remembrance of pain and sorrow.\u00a0 We must draw strength from our community and seek ways to impart that strength beyond Manitou Heights.<\/p>\n

We must believe.\u00a0 St. Olaf College is a community of faith populated by believers who profess their faith in a living God, celebrate that faith in daily worship, and pursue their free academic inquiry in a context shaped by their belief.\u00a0 The faith of this community, like the faith of Christians everywhere, has been tested by pain and suffering before, and it will be again.\u00a0 But our faith gives us strength precisely at times like this when our human powers are \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 simply inadequate to understand our world.\u00a0 The benevolent God who created and sustains this world sustains us in times of grief and wonder with the strength to approach the unanswerable and the endurance to persist in our questioning.\u00a0 It will take all of our faculties\u2014heart, mind, soul, and imagination\u2014to incorporate these shootings into our map of human experience, our understanding of ourselves, and our concept of the divine.<\/p>\n

It will also take time.\u00a0 In the coming days we will learn more about the troubled man who brought death to the campus of Virginia Tech, and we will learn about the lives cut short by his actions.\u00a0 Colleges will be asking what they can do differently to protect those who work and study there from violence and how they can better respond should violence occur in their midst.\u00a0 Spring will progress in Minnesota.\u00a0 The academic semester will conclude at St. Olaf, seniors will graduate, and around the country hundreds of members of the class of 2011 will begin to prepare themselves to come to Northfield to begin college.\u00a0 Next year at this time the new inductees to Phi Beta Kappa will hear a very different message from a different speaker. Institutions persevere.\u00a0 Life goes on.\u00a0 But tonight, muted in our celebration, let us remember all those who are suffering because of what happened in Virginia, and let us re-dedicate ourselves to using the gift of intellect to repair our wounded world.<\/p>\n

David R. Anderson ’74<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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