Best Commencement Speeches?
Religion & Liberty Online

Best Commencement Speeches?

The Blaze has rounded up “5 of the Best Conservative Commencement Speeches” for 2013. Here are a few choice quotes:

      1. Cardinal Timothy Dolan at Notre Dame University: “… you are asked the same pivotal question the Archangel Gabriel once posed to her: will you let God take flesh in you? Will you give God a human nature? Will He be reborn in you? Will the Incarnation continue in and through you?” Cardinal Dolan asked Notre Dame’s graduating class. “Here our goal is not just a career, but a call; not just a degree, but discipleship; not just what we’ve gotten but what we’re giving; not just the now but eternity; not just the ‘I’ but the ‘we’; not just the grades but the gospel.”
      2. Senator Ted Cruz (R – AZ) at Hillsdale College: “Areas under the yoke of dependency on government are among the least joyous parts of our society…We all flourish instead when afforded opportunity, the ability to work and create and accomplish. Economic growth and opportunity is the answer that works.
      3.  Colleen Campbell at Franciscan University of Steubenville: “We can even get stuck clinging to what God asked of us yesterday, and so find ourselves unable to heed his call in our lives today.”
      4. Congressman Paul Ryan (R – WI) at Benedictine  College: “Free enterprise doesn’t reward greed,” he continued. “It rewards value — because competition checks greed. And there’s no greater opportunity for greed than government cronyism. Greed knows how to exploit the pages of regulations.”
      5. Ryan T. Anderson at Regent University:  “[T]he obligations we have to our neighbors are not dependent on race, or sex, or social class. Neither are those duties dependent on age, or size, or stage of development. Or whether someone is wanted or unwanted, planned or unplanned, healthy or sick, ‘perfect’ or disabled. This starts with you and me. We need to love our children. Graduating class, if you have a daughter with Down syndrome, love her. If your son is conceived ‘by accident,’ love him.”

Elise Hilton

Communications Specialist at Acton Institute. M.A. in World Religions.