Ohio Dominican College

What I would like to speak about today is an inn at a crossroads. It is place to which travellers come along many different roads. They remain there for a time, sharing their lives and their thoughts as they sit together at the dinner table or stroll across the courtyard. They learn, they teach, they become friends.

Then the time comes when they must pack their bags, turn in their room-keys to the desk clerk, and set forth again, departing along as many different roads as they arrived by. The friends they made during the stay at the inn they may never see again, but the friendship will remain always. It may be, too, that their stay at the inn will have helped them in deciding where they wish to journey, and they may leave by a road they had never even imagined when they first arrived.

The inn I speak of is, of course, Ohio Dominican College. Today, we are gathered here for the last time together, to say our farewells to one another before we set forth down our chosen roads of life, and to try and express something of what our time here has meant to us.

We came here along many different roads, and the distance in miles we covered to arrive here was sometimes small, sometimes great. Some of us grew

. . .
t we would not have gotten in that specialized training was the sense of how the varied parts fit into the whole. The patterns and interrelationships that one finds in, say, economics, are similar to those that one finds in environmental studies. A satellite photograph of a hurricane in the Caribbean shows a spiral pattern that closely resembles that of a galaxy located millions of light-years away across the cosmos. That this should be so; that the same patterns should be found in so many different fields inquiry, is a mystery in the profoundest sense of the word. At Ohio Dominican College, we have been asked to confront that mystery in all its splendor. This is the essense of the liberal-arts tradition; that learning is something larger than training. We may forget many of the specific facts and rules that we learned in our classes. Sometimes, I admit, I managed forget them even before I was tested on them. What we will not forget is the ability to think, to reason, to see the connections. Nor was our education here confined to the classroom. The liberal-arts tradition in which Ohio Dominican College stands is a tradition that goes back to the universities of the Middle Ages, and ultimately to the monasteries that firs
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Dominican College, , Spangler Library, Albert Hall, Ohio Dominican, ohio dominican, Dark Ages, dominican college, ohio dominican college, College Dominican, Motel Six, Mary Springs, Middle Ages, set forth, spangler library, stay inn, inn ohio dominican, hundred miles, liberal-arts tradition, inn ohio, tradition ohio dominican, search truth, erskine hall, search truth truth, hall spangler library,
Approximate Word count = 1758
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Ohio Dominican College