"Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World" - John Granger speaks at Mount Aloysius College

Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World | September 06, 2012

Mount Aloysius 2012 Convocation Welcoming Remarks of President Tom Foley

Let’s begin with thanks to those who make it possible.

Good afternoon to all of you and welcome to this 73rd Convocation in the life of Mount Aloysius College.

Welcome to trustees, to faculty, staff, students, honored guests and friends. Thank you for this comfortable day, for this picturesque setting, for all these uplifted faces.

It is 159 years since the Sisters of Mercy first demonstrated their affection for these Laurel Highlands, when seven of their number welcomed 22 young ladies to what was then St. Aloysius Academy. It is 115 years since the building behind you first opened its doors as Mt Aloysius here in Cresson.

And as you sit out there—a century and a half after Mother Francis Xavier Warde commanded a similar but smaller assembly—I am acutely aware that your ability to concentrate is inversely related to how close we come to the dinner hour. So I have three distinct functions to perform here today, and about eight minutes left in which to do it. Let me get right to it.

First, a few words of thanks;

2 | Mount Aloysius College

word or two about what makes this event necessary; and third, a few thoughts on what makes this event so special.

second, a

First, to our faculty—We have an extraordinarily dedicated faculty at Mt Aloysius College. These are the people who are your academic, intellectual and professional guides. They will teach and test you in the classroom, in the laboratory, on the field and beyond. They won’t pick up after you, but they will look after you—when you need their help on a concept in the classroom or a personal challenge outside it. Today, we acknowledge their scholarship, we appreciate their service in the classroom, and we applaud their commitment to the mission of this college.

Second, to our staff—These too are guides and teachers to you. Some of them recruited you to come here, some helped you figure out how to pay for it, some of them will keep you warm and well fed, some will work with you on campus activities, campus ministry and intercollegiate sports. All of them will work together to keep you safe, healthy and involved. They are true partners to our trustees, to me and to our faculty— every day— in providing the best possible experience for these next few years for all of you.

Third, to the President’s Executive Council— They are the institutional glue on this campus, holding us all together through the challenges of freshmen orientation, new construction, old sewers, the creation of new academic programs of study and so much more.

Fourth, to Board of Trustees members with us today—The Trustees support, steward and strengthen Mt Aloysius. In short, they guide us through times good and bad. They share two traits in common—one, none of them went to school here; and two, all of them serve because they believe so strongly in the very idea of Mt Aloysius College and because they want so fiercely to create opportunities for all of you.

A special thank you to our predecessors who stood at these very places these last almost 160 years, especially to my immediate predecessor Sister Mary Ann Dillon and to her team. Though the Sisters of Mercy are few in number on our campus today, we salute them at this time in a special way every year—because it is they who built this institution from the ground up, and it is they whose commitment to core principles of mercy and justice, service and hospitality inspire us each and every day.

So thank you trustees, faculty, students, staff and all who conspired and inspired us to this day.

Second assignment, explain why a formal

September 06, 2012 | Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World

convocation is necessary. Why did we bother to set up all these chairs and require you to sit in them? In one sentence—we are acting out a symbolic tradition that is literally hundreds of years old.

This formal convocation ceremony has even deeper roots than Mt Aloysius College, dating back as much 800 years to the traditions of teaching and learning at the great medieval universities of Europe. This afternoon, we properly carry on a tradition that began in Bologna and at the Sorbonne, at Heidelberg and Edinburgh, at Valencia in Spain, Vilnius in Lithuania, Basel in Switzerland and Oxford and Cambridge in England.

Nearly a 1,000 years after the very first convocation, an American Secretary of Education spoke directly to the importance of what we begin here today. He said: “In an interconnected, competitive global economy, the only way to secure our common future is through education. It is the one true path out of poverty, the great equalizer that overcomes differences in background, culture and privilege. In the 21st century, a quality education system is the centerpiece of a country’s economic development, and it can be the one thing that unites us as a world.”

The message of Convocation is very simple— we are engaged, all of us—in the education of citizens for the betterment of themselves and the world in which they live. We convocate, convene—from the Latin con and vocare and the Greek ecclesias—to “come together”

.

to begin our serious endeavors of a new academic year, in this case by opening our minds to the ideas of a prominent thinker of our time—and,

. to look for something that as US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says “unites us as a world.”

Last assignment—explain why this particular convocation is special.

John Granger has been both original and prolific in professing his ideas, in the

classroom, in his writings and in his public advocacy and explication of them. He has lectured at some of the finest universities on the planet, and today, he honors us with his presence. We recognize John Granger for his brilliance, for his example of an educated life.

We chose Mr. Granger as our Convocation speaker—to formally open our school year— for reasons specific to the mission of the college. John Granger’s life work goes to the heart of this college’s mission—to “develop competence with compassion.” Please allow me to explain.

Best-selling author Thomas Freidman tells us that we live in an increasingly “flat” world where the technologies of texting and other 24/7 communication formats make “Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next door neighbors.” I happen to think we also live in an increasingly “divided” world, geographically, culturally, technologically, in terms of wealth and scarce resources, war and peace, education and illiteracy. We seem more often these days to incline to extremes rather than to common ground, let alone to what the late Dr. Martin Luther King described as a “single garment of destiny.” Words like “compromise” and “globalization” and even “diversity” are mostly now loaded terms with pejorative meanings.

And so last year, we focused our speaker series, our orientation events, our fall and spring honors lectures and our inauguration and commencement on the understanding and promotion of “Civil Discourse”—the idea that how we communicate in person, in public and on the internet should at all times be responsive and respectful, without compromising our beliefs or the passion behind them. We brought 11 speakers to campus, sponsored 15 events around the theme—in the classroom, in our lecture series and even in the dormitory. And Mt Aloysius received national recognition for our emphatic approach to the topic.

This year, we come at the same problem— Freidman’s “flat” world and my “divided’ one— from a slightly different angle. In the midst of all that diversity of opinion—the “divided world” that I referred to—there is one constant. And that constant is change— maybe the only constant in your young lives.

The danger in a world so driven by change—24/7 driven—is that the sheer pace of that change—and sometimes the sheer non-sense and unfathomability of some of it—means we start to lose our place in the world, in our own world—in our haven, our sanctuary, our personal or safe place, our home—as we try to deal with these 24/7 “inputs.”

This 24/7 pace means that you are bombarded with outraged opinions and supercilious spin every time you open your laptop or turn on the TV. This 24/7 pace means that you can get overwhelmed with what Dean of Faculty Dr. Fulop referred to as the “look and lifestyles of the Kardashians” to the exclusion of what he calls a “liberated mind.”

This 24/7 pace means that in keeping up with all that information, all the political, fashion, and lifestyle exhortations that are directed at you (and at you personally with the technology that is now available to internet marketeers), the sheer effort of keeping up can cause you to lose your own place in the world, in your world.

And so this year, we focus our attention on a theme that responds, we hope, to all that constant change—“Finding Home in a Changing World,” which we symbolize with one word from among the four Mercy core values—and that word is hospitality.

We embrace this theme of hospitality— “Finding Home in a Changing World”—with this convocation and we will return to it throughout the year at Mt Aloysius.

Mr. Granger is the perfect choice to kickoff that theme. He has taken perhaps the two most compelling series of your generation—The Hunger Games trilogy and the seven volumes of Harry Potter—and chosen to view them on occasion through the prism of hospitality— as metaphors for the challenge of—as one of his reviewers has put it—“finding home in an often inhospitable world.”

We are grateful for his research and writing, we are impressed by his worldwide reach with this theme, and we welcome him to Mt Aloysius.

Mount Aloysius College | 3

Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World | September 06, 2012

4 | Mount Aloysius College

September 06, 2012 | Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World

FINDING HOME IN AN INHOSPITABLE WORLD Mount Aloysius Convocation Address

Delivered by John Granger September 6, 2012

Thank you, Dr. Cook, President Foley, Dr. Fulop, Faculty Marshalls, Distinguished Faculty, Dr. Dragani, Mr. Fleming, and Mace Bearer Farcus for that introduction, for the invitation to speak here today, and for allowing me to participate in the procession. My talk this afternoon is largely an extended reflection on my experiences of your hospitality here as your guest.

But this talk is not for those behind me or for the faculty so much as it is for those immediately in front of me. I hope you’ll forgive me for thinking of and sharing, as I begin, the two times, too many years ago, that I sat where you sit. When dinosaurs walked the earth, I listened, first as a new undergraduate at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, and, then, after graduation, as a recruit in Parris Island, SC, on the 1st Battalion squadbay before the beginning of my Boot Camp training as a United States Marine.

I received the same message in essence at both places, different as they were, each time I sat where you sit, and, perhaps not surprisingly, though neither speaker in Chicago or Parris Island touched on movies that I had seen or books that I had read—or even used the word ‘hospitality’—much of what I will say here will echo what I heard then.

At my college, a professor gave the “Aims of Education” address to incoming undergraduates. As he became quite famous in later years before his death because of a book he wrote on the narrowness of the American mind, that talk is actually in print and I was able to read recently what I had heard live back in 1979. I’m sad to say

I didn’t remember hearing this talk even after having read it to myself.

What I remember of that occasion was what he said, after his formal presentation to the college, at my college house when he spoke semi-privately to thirty of us in something of a question & answer session. He told us, without equivocation or adornment, lest we walk away confused, that we were literally “idiots,” the Greek idios meaning ‘private person’ or ‘individual,’ and also, in the pejorative English sense of the word, quite stupid in our conceits and self-importance. He hoped very much that reading the Great Books in that college’s curriculum would transform us from our current state, little more than baboons in his estimation, to something like human beings.

I remember, too, that we resented his remarks very much and, sadly, that I came to understand in the next few years how right he was, that we did resemble the primates of his description in our ignorance and arrogance.

After graduation and marriage, I decided to fulfill something of a family tradition and join the Green Gun Club, also known as the United States Marine Corps. Having descended from the bus, followed the yellow footprints and had my head shaved, the Marine Corps officer who spoke to me and my fellow recruits was much kinder than the college professor in his remarks just before unleashing four drill instructors to remake us in Parris Island’s crucible.

He told us that he admired our courage for enlisting. He shared the “thanks of Mount Aloysius College | 5

Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World | September 06, 2012

a grateful nation” for the choice we had made and for the sacrifices we would make in the next four months of training. He assured us that we would be treated with respect as America’s finest young men—and asked us to tell him if we were physically beaten, mentally tortured, or verbally abused at any time. Like the professor, though, he was obliged to tell us that it was a very good thing that we had come to that place for our transformation because we would not be truly human until his experts had had their fifteen weeks to remake us.

Different as these locales and speakers were superficially, they were both right about my need for a radical transformation and the value of the initiation and experience I was about to have if only I could endure to the end. Both speakers, 6 | Mount Aloysius College

it is no accident, were speaking to human animals of about the same age, roughly your age on average, legally adults but thought of as young people at the beginning of their independent lives. It is no accident, of course, that college and military service begin at this age for the most part. The reason, I think, is that psychologically our

“You have elected to join a community... informed by the four virtues of Mercy, Service, Justice, and Hospitality... I think we can see that each of these qualities is a different name describing the same thing, namely, our capacity to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.”

ideas of self—received or derived from community, family, church, education, and sports – are, at your age, congealing into something whole, a distinct ego or persona. Before this self-identity from the arbitrary and almost infinitely various circumstances of our upbringing sets like concrete, and we become persons of historical accident, culture — in the form of a college or a screaming drill instructor—intervenes.

Before we are lost to “what we were born to be,” culture breaks down this incipient ego and expands our ideas of self and what it means to be human, so we might become “what a human being is for”— our lives as images, even likenesses of God. This re-making certainly works, as any jarhead, or any college graduate who thinks of his school as his ‘second

September 06, 2012 | Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World

mother’ will tell you. It only works, alas, if this transformation is a conscious choice you participate in actively and deliberately. It is in the hopes of waking you up to this necessary decision that colleges and basic training begin their

The Hospitality of Abraham

work with convocations and addresses such as this one. You may be here because of a conveyor belt that brought you here, but you will only become human at the end of this experience if you embrace now the journey you begin as your choice of a greater life.

You have elected to join a community of learning and transformation formed by the Sisters of Mercy and informed by the four virtues of Mercy, naturally, and of Service, Justice, and Hospitality.

Without thinking too hard, I think we can see that each of these qualities is a different name describing the same thing, namely, our capacity to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

We are merciful to others insomuch as we are mindful of our need for mercy from our judges, especially our God. We serve others, not from a false humility one hopes, but from an understanding of our brotherhood and shared origin in the Lord.

We pursue justice out of our respect for others and expectation that we, too, will be treated fairly by others and in the knowledge that we will be judged in the end.

Hospitality, though like the other virtues, is largely absent from the world outside havens like this community. It differs from service, mercy, and justice in not even receiving much lip-service or celebration. We think of it as our grandmother’s virtue, being kind or ‘nice’ to guests, making sure they are fed generously, have clean towels in the bathroom, maybe even putting them up when they have no other place to go.

The other virtues, forgive me, seem relatively heroic and global, something to celebrate in verse or with a novel, or to foster with a government program.

Hospitality is the virtue of Motel 6 or the Holiday Inn in common understanding. And if anything, as with the virtue of ‘obedience,’ I’m afraid it is written off as a virtue in a dog but as a failing, akin to willing subjection, in a person.

This is a shame because, like obedience, the love evident in true hospitality is the key to the other virtues celebrated by the Sisters of Mercy at the Mount, and is the foundation of authentic spiritual life. Hospitality reveals the human being you can become here through your studies and it helps, believe it or not, in understanding today’s most popular stories.

In brief, hospitality is the supernatural human capacity to love others not only as ourselves but also, to honor them as we do God. Today I want to share my reflections on this virtue by discussing a story I know many of you have read and many more of you have seen as a movie: Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games. I think it offers us a picture of how inhospitable our world is, the way to find a home or refuge in it, and how to be truly hospitable ourselves.

To review briefly, Hunger Games is the story of Katniss Everdeen, a woman in her teens, who lives in a dystopian North America. In this future world gone very bad called ‘Panem,’ there is a Capitol to which twelve surrounding Districts live in de facto slavery, each contributing a specific resource for the Capitol citizens’ use and pleasure.

“Hospitality...helps, believe it or not, in understanding [one of] today’s most popular stories...Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games...[which] offers us a picture of how inhospitable our world is, the way to find a home or refuge in it, and how to be truly hospitable ourselves.”

Katniss lives in District 12, the smallest, least populated, and seemingly most backward region, whose contribution is coal mined from the earth. It is presented as Appalachia in chains, a city surrounded by an electrified fence in which the miners and shopkeepers are all kept in various degrees of starvation and subservience.

The Capitol, though, does not restrict its subjection of the districts to economic and military shows of force.

It insists that every year each district send ‘tributes’—a teenage boy and girl, to fight the other tributes to the death in what are called ‘The Hunger Games.’

These tributes are paraded in districtthemed costumes, interviewed on television, and then placed in an arena stockpiled with weapons for them to murder one another, and with dangers created by the Gamesmakers to make sure the Games are good television.

Everyone in the Capitol watches for pleasure, a sadistic reality television, and everyone watches in the districts because they must.

Mount Aloysius College | 7

Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World | September 06, 2012

Katniss, though only a young woman, is the provider for her mother and sister because her father died in a mine explosion. She hunts and forages illegally in the forest outside the fence with her best friend, Gale, a young man a year or two older whose father was killed in the same explosion. We meet them on the day of the Reaping, the ceremony in which the Capitol chooses district tributes by lottery.

Katniss’ beloved younger sister, Prim, is chosen and Katniss, as the rules allow, volunteers to take her place. Peeta Mellark, the baker’s son, is chosen as District 12’s boy-tribute. The first novel and the movie adaptation is the story of Peeta and Katniss’ experiences in the Capitol and the Arena in their fight to survive.

8 | Mount Aloysius College

This story is a wonderful combination of the ancient myth of Theseus, Shirley Jackson’s short story, ‘The Lottery,’ the ‘Hogwarts’ Saga,’ and the TV program ‘Survivor.’ It is primarily, though, what is called “dystopian fiction,” which is to say, a story set in the future but which offers a critique of the world we live in today. Katniss’ Panem, its Districts’ slavery and decadent Capitol, is a miserable reality and a not so subtle caricature or cartoon depiction of our world’s present failings.

Suzanne Collins offers us a passage into experiencing the agonies of our time, a knowing beyond conscious understanding, by creating a story with a likeable heroine we care about who is struggling first just to feed her family, and then to survive the horrors of the Hunger Games Arena. Her world is

inhospitable, to say the least; it denies her the ability to legally provide for her mother and sister, restricts her freedom of speech, of mobility, and choice, and creates an existence in which individuals and families only look for their own survival and for any pathetic advantage. It is the world of Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich. Katniss has no intention to marry or have a family. Her world, as it stands, has taken from her the ability to think of a future with any love beyond the love of caring for her own.

How is this future fictional world-gonewrong a means to our experiencing the injustices and inequities of our time? The dystopian genre, though set in a time apart from our own is, like everything we read, experienced in our present tense, or more precisely,

September 06, 2012 | Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World

an eternal now of the imagination and heart. As with other classics of this kind such as George Orwell’s “1984,” the author can safely criticize the madness of our time by giving it a setting seemingly apart from our own age but which we have no choice but to enter into as ourselves.

The Capitol and its citizens in the Hunger Games is, I think, a depiction of ourselves — well-to-do Americans who have rarely, if ever, missed a meal— to whom the rest of the world serves up its resources and skills while living in relative poverty. The made-for-television entertainment savagery of the Hunger Games Arena is a not very subtle cartoon sketch of our reality TV shows and our relationship to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as Orwell depicted in “1984” the social injustice and socialist government-gone-mad of the United Kingdom in 1948, so Collins is allowing us, alongside her despicable Capitol voyeurs watching Katniss run her three arena gauntlets, to see ourselves as those citizens and

to sympathize with those subject to our military and economic power.

I certainly do not believe that the Hunger Games trilogy is as popular as it is, though, because we are so grateful for Ms. Collins for poking us hard in the eye with the sharp stick of political satire. Sharp as her stick is, and as hard as she does poke us with it, I think the reason we love the stories—beyond those movie viewers that enjoy the show sadistically as the fictional Capitol citizens do, is because of the answers Katniss’ story gives us to the problems of surviving, escaping, transcending, even changing an inhospitable world.

Collins’ answer to Katniss’ and by extension every person’s problem, is in her allegorical depiction of our most important choice and the spiritual consequences of making the heroic right choice.

To understand this, I have to note briefly what allegory or symbolism is and what it isn’t.

It isn’t, praise God, re-telling a real world story or history in the guise of a fictional setting with the important players re-named. Though some want to believe that The Lord of the Rings series and the Harry Potter series are allegories of the Second World War

“The dystopian genre, though set in a time apart from our own is, like everything we read, experienced in our present tense, or more precisely, an eternal now of the imagination and heart.”

with Sauron and Voldemort as Hitler on the one side and Dumbledore’s Army and the Fellowship of the Ring as the victorious allies on the other. If anything, it is more true that the history of second World War and its various

From left to right are: Tom Foley, President; Daniel Rullo, Chair, Board of Trustees; John Granger; Trustees Phillip Devorris, Edward Sheehan, and James Lyons; and Dr. Timothy Fullop, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs.

Mount Aloysius College | 9

Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World | September 06, 2012

Faculty and students join John Granger for a luncheon discussion.

black and white hats were actings-out of the same eternal story that Tolkien and Joanne Rowling retold in their magical sub-creations.

Allegory properly understood is not two lists, side-by-side, in which story figures and events correspond, tit-for-tat, with real-world people and history. Allegory and symbolism are windows through which we see supernatural realities and truths fleshed out in characters and their stories. We can grasp the realities and truths imaginatively, even experience them, inasmuch as we enter into the story.

The three most popular stories of the 21st Century – Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games — all feature a traditional allegorical element,

“Allegory and symbolism are windows through which we see supernatural realities and truths fleshed out in characters and their stories. We can grasp the realities and truths imaginatively, even experience them, in as much as we enter into the story.”

10 | Mount Aloysius College

namely, a leading cast of three persons who are symbolic transparencies or windows for the three principal faculties of the soul. Ron, Hermione, and Harry; Jacob, Edward, and Bella; and Gale, Katniss, and Peeta are all what is called by literature geeks “soul triptychs” —three-paneled icons of the soul’s desiring, thinking, and loving capacities, what we usually call ‘body, mind, and spirit.’

This three-part character story in which the soul’s journey is told in the form of an adventure is nothing new. It’s as old as the Charioteer in Plato’s “Phaedrus,” it’s featured in “The Brothers Karamazov,” which many consider the greatest novel ever written. And it’s something we can see in the three Hobbits on Tolkien’s Mount Doom; in Bones, Spock, and Kirk on Star Trek; and in Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.

These soul-triptych stories work as well as they do because of what happens when we read. We “suspend disbelief,” meaning we turn off our critical faculties and enter into the story imagining ourselves within it through the ‘eye of the heart.’ In stories with characters serving as stand-ins

for the soul’s physical, rational, and spiritual capacities, we experience their relationships as how the soul’s faculties are best aligned when desire answers to will and mind — both obedient to the directions of the heart or spirit.

The Hunger Games principal characters are Katniss, Gale, and Peeta. Katniss and Gale are almost brother and sister as they are described in the first book’s opening chapters. This relationship corresponds wonderfully with the body and soul pairing in allegory.

We are all unions of body and soul, a psychosomatic unity joined seamlessly — toes-to-nose. Gale and Katniss’ lives in the Seam and Forest are story depictions of the soul-and-body life we live in the world.

The inciting incident of the book is the Reaping, another name for Death, in which Katniss’ sister, Prim, is chosen as Tribute. The choice that Katniss makes is the one of sacrificial love to save the life of a beloved sister. The soul is separated from the body.

And immediately Peeta appears, the second District 12 tribute. We learn that he saved Katniss’ life years before by sacrificially giving her bread from

September 06, 2012 | Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World

the bakery when she was starving, bread he had burnt intentionally, for which he was beaten. Because Peeta’s appearances are at Katniss’ times of greatest need, because his name is assonant with both pita bread and St. Peter, because speech, his Word, is his greatest power, and because he loves Katniss sacrificially and unconditionally, it is no stretch to see him as the spiritual aspect of our souls, the part Jesus of Nazareth always calls ‘the heart.’

imaginative experience of the soul making heroic, correct choices.

As I said when we began, the college professor and Marine Corps officer who spoke at the convocations before my initiations and transforming experiences when I was your age didn’t

The Hunger Games, viewed in this light, is the soul’s journey from its identification with the body and its worldly view and pre-occupations, to a love for the heart which is Christ’s.

Katniss is victorious in her Hunger Games Arena because of Peeta’s love and her growing ability to recognize it and to accept him, as Gale puts it, as the person “that she cannot live without.”

Mircea Eliade writes in his “Sacred and the Profane” that in a secular culture, one in which God has been pushed to the periphery of the public square and of our thinking, entertainments serve a mythic or religious function. They are our means, in other words, to get beyond our ego existence and transcend the individual selves behind the persona-masks we wear. Story — in the shape of books we read, television programs and movies we watch, or athletic dramas in big stadiums — is the de facto religion of atheist America.

My corollary to Eliade’s thesis is that the more profound a mythic or transcending experience a story delivers, the more popular it will be. It is no accident, in other words, that the Hogwarts, Twilight, and Hunger Games sagas are suffused with traditional Christian artistry, symbolism, and meaning that deliver a salutary

I believe you are singularly and providentially blessed to have chosen to attend a college with a focus on the virtues embraced and incarnate in the Sisters of Mercy, especially Hospitality.

I hope you will take away from Katniss Everdeen’s story, a postmodern and powerful retelling of the Christian soul’s journey to choose to accept the love of Christ, the truth that is your refuge in an inhospitable world.

The inexhaustible source of your hospitality offered to your neighbor, even your enemy, is your acceptance of and identification with Love Himself.

We are all Katniss Everdeen, separated from our Father unnaturally, struggling to find a place in an inhospitable world, and pre-occupied with that world sufficiently that we are blind to the Love and Light of the World that brings us into existence moment-to-moment.

mention books that I had read or say anything about hospitality. Perhaps if they had read the Hunger Games or viewed the world as the inhospitable place it has become thirty years later, they might have.

You live in an inhospitable world. As you live in the Capitol rather than the districts, you do not suffer from physical so much as spiritual want.

And your transformation in the higher education you are beginning is properly about finding a home, creating a refuge, in an unloving world outside these walls.

best.

I pray that, in this relative Eden, a hospitable and loving refuge east of Pittsburgh, you are liberated from this childish and egotistic blindness and that you come to know the real world’s Peeta in the Body of Christ, His Church. I hope, too, that you learn from your brilliant professors how to see Him in the world around you as well as in the stories you love

Thank you, again, for the honor of being invited to speak with you today, and for the hospitality I have enjoyed, and for which The Mount is so well known.

You have my best wishes that your experiences here are much more pleasant, but just as transformative, as mine were as a new college student and Marine recruit years ago. I welcome you to the crucible of higher education and invite you to embrace it consciously for your more thorough change and much greater life, in Christ.

Mount Aloysius College | 11

Finding Home in an Often Inhospitable World | September 06, 2012

Biographical Note John Granger, a classicist trained at Phillips Exeter and the University of Chicago, is a writer, commentator, and literary critic. He has written and lectured on subjects as varied as C.S. Lewis, food as sacrament, home schooling, prayer, and scripture. Mr. Granger is best known for his analysis of popular fiction. The eight books

states establishes the internal logic of the series.

that he has authored or co-authored on the popular J.K. Rowling series led Time to declare him the “Dean of the Harry Potter Scholars.” He has given over 100 print, radio, and television interviews, including in the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times; and he has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and A&E. Mr. Granger was the first critic to identify and explore the Christian themes of the Harry Potter books and to develop the theme of literary alchemy—the process by which base materials are symbolically turned into something precious—which the author

his literary talents to an examination of The Hunger Games trilogy. As with the Harry Potter series, Mr Granger has continued to explore and explain the symbolism, myth, allegory, and iconography that give these highly popular series their deep and affecting moral power. Mr. Granger has been lauded as “a lively guide to the application of ancient wisdom for modern living… [who] aims to open the hearts and minds of his audience to a larger view of themselves and reality.”

His books are used in university classrooms across the country and his

12 | Mount Aloysius College

Mr. Granger has also lectured on the popular Twilight series and recently published a book entitled, “Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.” Most recently, he has turned

blogs and podcasts are closely followed.

In his role as scholarly interpreter of these popular series, Mr. Granger has become, as one reviewer put it, “the gatekeeper of the shared texts of the younger generation.”

Mr. Granger served six years in United States Marine Corp and has taught

Latin and English at the secondary and collegiate levels. Mr. Granger lives in Oklahoma City with his wife, Mary, and their children. He is an ordained Christian Reader (Psalte) in the Orthodox Church.