Inauguration Speech

Robert B. Lawton, S.J.
Inauguration Address
The Glory of God is a Human Being Fully Alive

October 5, 1999

Inaugurations are intriguing. Medieval garb and customs insinuate themselves into the modern world and remind us that the great human tasks of increasing knowledge, cherishing wisdom and educating the young are not of our own age only. We share them with the centuries. And the presence of religious, business and civic leaders, of benefactors and alumni, underscores that universities do not pursue these tasks alone. "War," Clemenceau remarked, "is too important to be left to generals." The same is true of education and academic leaders. Universities belong to larger worlds and cultures, serve interests outside themselves.

You will no doubt be happy to hear that I don't intend to survey the history of higher education from Babylonia to California. I do want to say a word or two, however, about education's wider context. I want to speak briefly about city, church, and university. Although the topic is general, the particular has hugged my thinking: Los Angeles County with its 88 cities, the Catholic Church of Southern California, Loyola Marymount University. City, church, university. Together they bring individuals to fullness of life, the glory of God.

We like to guess the future, give it a name, to guide both our understanding and our action. The coming millennium promises to be the age of the city. A hundred years ago nearly 90 percent of the world's population lived outside cities. Today less than half of it does. As Gary Wills (The New York Review of Books) has noted: "City complexes, with their rapidly changing functions as nodes of technological sophistication and services, grow exponentially, not least in the Third World, which now contains eight of the thirteen cities with populations over ten million. ...Kinshasa has added from five to eight million people in just two generations... Cairo acquires a thousand new inhabitants a day... India now has three [cities] with more than ten million inhabitants." "Urbanization is the most powerful of the world's demographic trends" (Kenneth T. Jackson, The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century).

The face, better the "faces" of the future: the city. A city necessarily attracts diversity, diverse occupations, talents, viewpoints; "things counter, parti, pied, several." As people pursue their occupations and deploy their talents, they look over their shoulders, emulate and try to outdo each other, with those of exceptional achievement inspiring the rest. In the city, people stretch themselves, accomplishing more than they otherwise would.

And, of course, because of their numbers, cities, especially large ones, promote anonymity. Cities give people space to try out different versions of themselves, discover their uniqueness, nurture its growth. People speculate, debate, experiment. Cities favor particular perfections. But they are not always kind to the familiar and the small. Nor to the sick, the lonely, the unattractive, those left to the side in the city's competitive rush. The Church reminds us of the widow and the orphan, the immigrant and the oppressed, urges us to reflect on how society's structures marginalize and crush as well as stretch and inspire. The Church invites us to contemplate what we would gladly flee in the city's dazzle, the mystery of death, indeed the "mystery" of life, the God beyond our imaginations, what this God might say.

"The glory of God is a human being fully alive." Cities alone can lead us to imagine this ideal in too external a way, as if God's mere delight were the beautiful person of educated talents and sharpened sophistication: "But the Lord said to Samuel, "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see, but the Lord looks at the heart." Being "fully alive" demands deepened compassion as well as developed skills, habits of heart as well as of mind.

Skill and compassion; mind and heart; reason and faith; the perfection of self and the love of others. As they strive to shape us, the city and the Church have a charged relationship, at times explosive, sometimes distant, occasionally warm, rarely easy. They fight, and embrace, and try to understand one another at Catholic universities. Great Catholic universities have a far more complicated, ultimately richer, agenda than their secular counterparts. As they struggle to increase knowledge, cherish wisdom and educate the young, they bring to bear both the experience of the city and the traditions of the Church. Clement of Alexandria observed: "There is but one river of truth, but many streams fall into it on this side and on that." Catholic universities are fairly far down river.

To make my thinking a little clearer, let me turn more explicit before I conclude: the county of Los Angeles, the Church of Southern California, Loyola Marymount University.

Dr. Johnson once remarked to Boswell: "A great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life." And great cities have particular moments when the lessons they teach transcend space and time, cross boundaries, span centuries: ancient Athens, imperial Rome, pre-war Paris, cold-war Berlin. And surely this is such a moment for Los Angeles, the modern megalopolis par excellence.

With nearly 100 ethnic, national, racial and religious groups, this city is the most socially diverse in the world, a world where people of different cultures have to learn to live together. As this city expands, it at times respects, at times mars the beautiful setting with which nature has gifted it; this in a world that must necessarily learn to care for its physical environment.

Here, of course, are also all the trades and occupations, the competition and the anonymity, the old money and the new that enliven any great city; but with one element in addition. Like Renaissance Florence, this city fashions the images that shape the world and define our times. Modern Los Angeles is "to be sure, the school for studying life." From its lessons the wider world, and the coming centuries, can learn.

But the lessons it teaches are not all good. They don't all help a person to become fully alive. The citizens of this city need the Church.

In a city that flaunts wealth, the Church reaches out to the poor. In a city that caresses the present, the Church speaks of eternity. In a city that worships youth, the Church invites us to ponder death and the Lord of life and death. In a city that adores beauty, the Church talks about a Savior "who had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him."

Of course, not all the lessons go one way. The Church must learn as well, learn to listen to God speaking in a city's works and ways, breaking open the superstitions, rigidity, and poverty of imagination to which religion often succumbs. The Church has its own means of keeping a person from being fully alive.

Los Angeles, city and county. The Catholic Church of Southern California. What a great backyard for a university! And Loyola Marymount University is not here simply to play, to enjoy without responsibility the academic advantages of this place.

The university is committed to educating young people to be contemplatives-in-action, reflective practitioners, practical dreamers. We seek to stretch their imaginations, helping them to look at themselves and the world in new ways, encouraging them to think beyond their likely careers and their society's status quo, to dream large about the possibilities for their own lives and for the world around them.

And we seek to develop those skills that enable action in the world: the ability to read carefully, to process information intelligently, to judge critically, to communicate persuasively, to understand what constitutes scientific proof.

In short, we want to give our students those skills that will enable them to turn their dreams into reality, at least somewhat, in a swirling, technological, beautifully complicated world. Put another way, we want to harness the richness of both this city and the Church to help our students, in all their uniqueness and diversity, to become fully alive. And we want them, their imaginations empowered, their skills developed, their compassion enriched, to help this great region of the world grow into God's dream for it.

We have high expectations for our faculty. We ask not only for their creativity and commitment in educating the young. We ask that through their research and publication they probe the unsettling questions -- and the unexamined assumptions -- of city and church, that at times they help the two of them negotiate their claims.

There are five areas where this university, through its graduate and professional programs, will strive to make singular contributions to this region and through it to the world: ethics, the law, theology, education, film and television. This city cries out for the intellectual exploration of ethical questions. The university has been establishing endowed chairs in areas of ethical concern and will take full advantage of the talent these chairs have attracted. A prime area where ethics turns practical is the law. The law and lawyers help us to manage the complicated concerns of our lives with justice, equity and fairness. We will continue to focus resources on our ever-stronger Law School. A significant contribution that a Catholic university can make is rigorous theological reflection. What does the richly diverse culture of this part of the country at a millennium's dawn tell us and the world about God and what God might be saying? LMU's theology program is impressive, and we will continue to enhance it. One of the surest ways, both to touch an individual's life and to affect a whole region, is through teaching. When the young are as numerous as Southern California's, it makes most sense to teach the teachers. So the future will find us directing more resources to the School of Education.

Finally, film and television. Images can be more powerful than ideas. The values they assume or articulate shape us individually and as a community subtly and seductively. We will be significantly enhancing our programs, already strong, in film and television. We want to educate men and women who will be the masters of their craft to be sure, but who will also have a sophisticated sense of their ethical responsibilities. We also want to fill the industry with people who can write a good story and draw characters of some tangle and complexity.

Los Angeles, the Church of Southern California, Loyola Marymount University. City, church, university. Together we can create a holy spot, here by the Pacific's shore where "things counter, parti, pied, several" thrive; where men and women, diverse in talents, interests, and cultural backgrounds, can come fully alive, for God's glory and the world's good. This beautiful labyrinth, by the ocean and the hills, can truly become, through God's grace and our good work, a City of the Angels. Thank you for your kind attention.