David Bednar vs Oprah Winfrey?

My sister and I both graduated in the last couple of weeks. I attended the commencement ceremonies both at BYU and at Stanford. The commencement speakers at the two events appeared to be about as different as possible. David A Bednar, the calm academic LDS Apostle was asked to speak at BYU, while Oprah Winfrey, the lively Chicago native talk show host was asked to speak at Stanford. Their styles of delivery could not have been more different. Elder Bednar speaks very correctly, succinctly, and concisely – like an academic well trained in public speaking. Oprah is also well trained albeit in a very different style. She is boisterous, hip, and engaging in her tone and diction. She sounds anything but academic, and appealed much more to the emotion of the crowd than Elder Bednar did.

Elder Bednar’s speech focused on learning to love education, and on learning to serve using our education, he also touched on following the spirit and being happy. I could not have been more surprised when Oprah stood up and said that she wanted to talk about three things: following your feelings, serving with your education, and being happy. Despite their radically different modes of presentation, their basic message to the graduating class of ’08 was exactly the same! In speaking with a few others who attended both ceremonies they confirmed my feeling that the two speeches were really harping on the same exact themes.

This has given me cause to reflect on the various costumes and make-up that truth can wear around us and has taught me a valuable lesson about learning that neither Elder Bednar not Oprah touched on. I am used to receiving truth wearing a certain style of clothes. Generally I find the way academic and religious truth is presented to me help me to understand and internalize their relative weight and importance. However, what a tragedy it would be for me or anyone else to shut out entire other modes of presenting ideas, and truths merely because the ideas are dressed up differently with perhaps more make-up. I don’t mean to imply that all modes of presenting ideas are equal, or that the presentation doesn’t matter – I believe that it does – but filtering through the presentation to determine the merit of the message is important. In the words of Dallin Oaks, tolerance is a way of reacting to diversity, not a command to isolate it from careful inspection. In our daily peripatetic, we ought to react with tolerance to various modes of presenting information, and subject them all to careful inspection. Certainly we ought to the allocate our time and efforts into those studies that appear more profitable, but never to the out right exclusion of other possibilities for learning.