Read more coverage on Wright’s scheduled visit.

As an institution of higher education, it is commendable to welcome speakers from different backgrounds with different world views. It is a welcoming challenge to the students’ intellects, and no matter how controversial guests may be, it is important for adults in the community to be able to hear all types of opinions.

But there is a difference between welcoming controversial views and embracing them.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, will be honored by the Brite Divinity School at a black church studies banquet at the end of this month, and it raises questions of where the institution’s values lie.

To name a few examples of some ludicrous remarks he has made during sermons, Wright has accused the country of being a white-supremacist and black-inferiority state, and blamed the government’s foreign policies for the Sept. 11 attacks in New York.

Brite maintains that it is honoring Wright not for his controversial remarks, but for his social contribution to the black church community. But it is difficult to imagine Wright would make a good role model to Brite, which is supposed to be training future preachers. And preachers, like people in any other career fields, should be looking up to established preachers who are honorable inside and out, and who are successful socially and behind the pulpit, not one or the other.

The institution should be honoring figures in society who are respectable in and outside of the spotlight, in public and private. The fact that Brite has to defend its decision to honor a man for downfalls the whole nation has picked up in the media, makes its criteria for the Black Church Leader Award shoddy at best.