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Members of Meadville Lombard's 2006 graduating class were ushered out of academia and into the world with admonitions to be "unholy and unwise" and even "ignorant."
In his commencement address, "The Duty to be Unholy and Unwise," The Rev. Dr. Richard S. Gilbert asked graduates to ponder the possibilities for Liberal Religious traditions while fully grasping the times we are currently living in and the paradox that what makes liberal religion "genius" may also be what keeps us filling minority seats, both political and social.
"Orthodox religion," Gilbert said, "has seldom wanted to say 'on the other hand.' By contrast, the very genius of liberal religion is to be able to speak those four fateful words-'on the other hand.' We believe in the duty to be unholy and unwise-not to think ourselves more holy than we ought, nor to think ourselves more wise than we are. We could almost say we pride ourselves in our theological humility. But have we gone too far in our commitment to be unholy and unwise; are we too humble in our religious claims?"
Gilbert urged the students to understand that it is certainty that holds people to conservative religious, political and social positions. "Are we so open to other views, so cautious in our fear of being dogmatic, so enamored of the ambiguity and ambivalence in religious and political life that we are, in fact, steam-rollered by those who claim absolute certainty in religion (because the Bible tells them so) or in politics (because Karl Rove tells them so)?"
But in liberal religion, Gilbert says, we live often with those four words in the background. "Doubts plague us," he told the graduates. "We have a duty to be unholy and unwise-to interrogate life as to its worthwhileness, to question ourselves and our religious commitments, to test our faith in the workshop of doubt. We define and refine our religious commitments in the laboratory of living, we do this with an optimistic bias that in the final analysis, we will find life worth the living. Our task as religious leaders is to live that faith in such a way that it will be contagious."
In his Charge to the Graduates, The Rev. David E. Bumbaugh, BD '64, urged the graduating class to embrace Wendell Berry's "way of ignorance" to make it safely through the world in which we currently live.
"Berry reminds us," said Bumbaugh, "that all our knowing, all our wisdom, all our convictions float in a vast sea of ignorance and misconception; that what we don't know, what we don't understand, what we cannot envision may be more important than all of our highly attested competencies and brightly burnished truths. Berry reminds us that behind all our brave assertions about the world, about truth, and about justice lie profound unasked, indeed, often half-formed questions. In light of that reality, he suggests, we are driven to embrace humility and mercy as the cardinal human virtues."
Bumbaugh reminded the graduates "ministry has never been about definitions or answers. It has always been about questions-questions too deep and profound for any of us to answer definitively in one lifetime."
Bumbaugh then charged the students to "carry with you the deep and abiding questions.for it is in asking the questions that ministry acquires depth and power."
Prizes for excellence in scholarship were awarded during the commencement ceremony as follows:
- The Robert Charles Billings prize for excellence in scholarship of the Master of Divinity graduates: Jane Page.
- The Clayton Raymond Bowen Prize for excellence in New Testament studies: Jane Page for her paper " Passion Stories from Gospel to Film."
- The Roberta Nelson Prize for excellence in the practice and scholarship of religious education: Vera O'Brien.
- The Frank Carlton Doan Prize for the best essay in the Philosophy of Religion: Ellen Cooper-Davis for her essay, "Towards a Unitarian Universalism Ethic of Human Rights."
- The faculty award for recognition of the graduating Master of Divinity student who best exemplifies religious leadership: Sara Hayman.
- The Robert Charles Billings Prize for excellence in preaching: Bill Neely, for his April 19th sermon, "More than One, More than us."
- The John Godbey Prize in Historical Studies: Aaron McEmrys, for his paper "Brook Farm: The Rise, Fall and Legacy of a 'City of God'" (read Aaron's paper in its entirety here).
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