Osborne Challenges Students to Say Yes
“When the call comes for you in life, will you answer yes?”
This was the culminating question Eric Osborne ’00 posed during chapel August 14.
This was the culminating question Eric Osborne ’00 posed during chapel August 14.
A partner at Sherrard Roe Voigt & Harbison law firm in Nashville, Osborne built and led a team of over a dozen lawyers across four Nashville-area firms representing the surviving victims of the 2023 Covenant School tragedy in their effort to prevent the release of the shooter’s writings. For their work, the team was awarded the 2025 Harris Gilbert Pro Bono Attorney of the Year Award by the Tennessee Bar Association.
His work on the case began with saying “yes” to a surviving victim’s parent.
He anchored his chapel message with two concepts he repeated as if he presented a case in defense of saying yes to good works:
“The world is more complicated than you know.”
“The world is more beautiful than you can imagine.”
Osborne used historical examples from the lives of adventurer Sir Robert Shirley (1629-1656), novelist Alan Paton (1903-1988), and revolutionary Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) to weave a story of one man inspiring the legacy of the next.
Connecting the points of his appeal to the students, Osborne used an inscription from Chapel of the Holy Trinity in Staunton Harold, Leicestershire, England, reading (paraphrased):
“In the year 1652, when through England all things sacred were either profaned or neglected, this church was built by Sir Robert Shirley, whose special praise it is to have done the best of things in the worst of times and to have hoped them in the most calamitous.”
Osborne described the effect of the Covenant shooting on the Nashville community, his experience while representing the parents in the groundbreaking legal effort, and the many beautiful acts of grace that took place during the weeks and months after the tragedy.
Encouraging students to answer the call to help, he concluded, “Twenty-seven years ago, as a senior at MUS, I gave a speech on this stage in which I told my classmates that small, good deeds can change the world. I learned in my work with the Covenant families just how true that is.
“A good deed can change the world. Do you believe that? You should. Because it’s true.”
See the recording of his presentation HERE.
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His work on the case began with saying “yes” to a surviving victim’s parent.
He anchored his chapel message with two concepts he repeated as if he presented a case in defense of saying yes to good works:
“The world is more complicated than you know.”
“The world is more beautiful than you can imagine.”
Osborne used historical examples from the lives of adventurer Sir Robert Shirley (1629-1656), novelist Alan Paton (1903-1988), and revolutionary Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) to weave a story of one man inspiring the legacy of the next.
Connecting the points of his appeal to the students, Osborne used an inscription from Chapel of the Holy Trinity in Staunton Harold, Leicestershire, England, reading (paraphrased):
“In the year 1652, when through England all things sacred were either profaned or neglected, this church was built by Sir Robert Shirley, whose special praise it is to have done the best of things in the worst of times and to have hoped them in the most calamitous.”
Osborne described the effect of the Covenant shooting on the Nashville community, his experience while representing the parents in the groundbreaking legal effort, and the many beautiful acts of grace that took place during the weeks and months after the tragedy.
Encouraging students to answer the call to help, he concluded, “Twenty-seven years ago, as a senior at MUS, I gave a speech on this stage in which I told my classmates that small, good deeds can change the world. I learned in my work with the Covenant families just how true that is.
“A good deed can change the world. Do you believe that? You should. Because it’s true.”
See the recording of his presentation HERE.
Embracing a Bold Vision. Building a Bright Future.
Memphis University School is a college-preparatory, independent, day school for boys in Grades 6-12.
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