About Us
We, the men of the provisional chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha at the University of Richmond, pledge to be good hosts for ourselves, our community, and our brotherhood. Since our founding close to a year ago, our mission has been to be good hosts. By no means do we mean host in the restricted sense, either. A good host is constantly in the service of others in the broadest capacity, unfettered by any physical structures. It should be, we take it, our highest point of pride if one can truly say we have been good hosts. We say this in the past tense since, pointing toward the future, one can always be better; this isn’t a milestone we can ever reach, but certainly one we can achieve. We aren’t, of course, the first group of people to hold such a view. The Greeks called it xenia, the virtue found in the offering of hospitality. Xenia was such an esteemed virtue that every myth where someone acted on the vice of inhospitality involves a responsive invocation of Zeus’s wrath. Zeus decimated an entire village because some occupants wouldn’t let an old man into their homes during a storm. We try to keep the mindset that our village, also known as our brotherhood, might well be destroyed in the same fashion if we, too, become inhospitable. Thus, from xenia, we derive the ways in which we better ourselves, our fraternity, and our community. We also recognize the relationship between hosting and leadership, with both involving the use of power to serve others. Accordingly, we view it as only proper that we strive to be a fraternity filled with leaders to pursue the virtue of xenia. We continue to recruit men who we believe to be fully capable of said pursuit. In doing so, we only serve to further our capacity to be good hosts of the community and build an inclusive brotherhood.
