Professor Emeritus Walter E. Fluker (’88) delivers 2024 BU Baccalaureate Address
The following is an excerpt from BU Today’s article ““We Are Called, My Friends, to Be Peacemakers,” Rev. Walter E. Fluker Tells Boston University’s Baccalaureate Audience” by Rich Barlow published on May 19, 2024, featuring Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Ethical Leadership Walter E. Fluker.
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Addressing the hundreds gathered in Marsh Chapel, Fluker (GRS’88, STH’88, Hon.’24), Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor Emeritus, of Ethical Leadership at BU’s School of Theology, warned of today’s “potential for madness—moral, spiritual, psychological, collective chaos,” evidenced in the “social and geopolitical” strife engulfing the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, and other nations.
To leaven any sense of doom, Fluker sang and then led the congregation in a brief, impromptu hymn, “There’s Hope for This World.” Fulfilling that hope, he continued, requires following the embrace of “holy madness” by the late BU professor and Holocaust survivor/chronicler Elie Wiesel (Hon.’74)—the insistence on human rights in a world that often denies them.
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