Transcript: Well this will sound very strange coming from an arch-Protestant, which I am. But I would be intrigued to talk with the Pope. And why would I want to talk with old Red Socks? Because the Pope is a man of vast learning, vast influence, and profound passions. And whether I like him or not, or like everything that he says or not, he has attracted the imagination, as his predecessors have, of millions of people. And there has to be something there that could be of good use. I would like to have an hour off record in a private room with the Pope. I find . . . I think he would be an interesting person. I might turn out terribly disappointed at the end of it. But I’m not so sure. I think I might be greatly enlightened by that. It’s hard to think of anybody else, quite frankly. I can’t think of a single political leader with whom I would want to spend five minutes, with the possible exemption of Nelson Mandela, with whom I spent more than five minutes in this very room. I can’t think of anybody who’s running anything at the moment that would keep me particularly interested in talking with. And the other sort of people that I would want to talk to, alas all day . . . I mean I’d love to talk to T.S. Elliott. I would . . . I think I would find Shakespeare an interesting person ____ slightly jaundiced view of the world which I share. I would enjoy that. I think that I would like to . . . I wish I had known Franklin Roosevelt. I regard him as one of the great heroes of the 20th century church. Churchill, another great figure. Alas, I cannot think of anybody else.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Transcript: Dealing with my students gives me the most hope. I see an enormous range of talent and opportunity in the students that pass through my courses, and through the church, and through the other settings in which I meet young people here and across the country. I have tremendous hope in the rising generation. I believe in them. I believe not only are they, in terms of the initial statistics, smarter than their parents. I believe that they are less capable of being seduced by the talents and the treasures of this world. That they have a higher standard of what they want, and what they feel they deserve, and what the world requires. I look to them to . . . to produce, in some sense, this ideal world. Their parents have had their chance and they’ve squandered it. There’s not much there to be had, it seems to me. But in these young kids that we produce regularly each year out of college despite this one, I believe, is the world’s best chance, the world’s best hope. That gives me cause for encouragement.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Question: How do you explain the resurgence of religion among today’s youth?

Question: young people are smarter than we think. They’re not prepared to buy an opinion _______. They are not prepared to put up with the triumph of the material or the mendacious. That even the most indulgent face book patron under 21 is seeking something of value, something of worth, something that will last, something that is permanent and even transforming. And I think that has to do, for example, with the fascination with science fiction, with myth and fantasy. It’s the Harry Potter thing. It’s looking for something that is ultimately true and good. They are not willing to buy the rather grim valueless, godless, spiritual-less universe which some of their elders are quite prepared to sell them. And I think that that suggests a great hunger, a great desire, a great spiritual movement among the cleverest and the most able of our young people. They know better than to be content with less than . . . less than the best. And that’s what they are seeking.

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Transcript: Well I think these young people have been brought up in a culture of enormous wealth, enormous power, enormous opportunity. The least well-off of them is considerably better than the best of their ancestors. I think they recognize that. They see the signs off success – as the world defines success – and opulence on every hand. They’re surrounded by sensation. They’re surrounded by violence. They’re surrounded by politics. None of these are capable of delivering the goods and I think they recognize that. And I think there is a desire to find something that will last, something that will endure, something that will not disappoint. And when you do that, inevitably you are tempted to turn back to the elders, to the wisdom of another age, to something that might not seem to have appealed to you in your earlier phase; but your earlier phase, you recognize, was a deceitful and deceptive one. You ask Harvard graduates where they’re all going, and they’re all going to go . . . 90% of the seniors in any given class say they’re going to three cities. They’re going to go to Washington to put things right: power. They’re going to go to New York to make lots of money: the material world. And they’re going to Los Angeles to have fun: fantasy. And I think they come back from all three of those cities discovering that, like Oz, there’s no there there. Washington is not going to turn the world right side up. All the money in New York doesn’t spare it the troubles and tribulations of living in New York. And all the fantasy from la la land doesn’t dull the pain from living in a life with no meaning and no value. And that’s a modern symbol, I think. People say, “Okay. There must be another way.” Maybe Jerusalem is the place. Maybe a pilgrimage to a holy city is the place. Maybe some ______ somewhere. Maybe sitting under a ____ tree. Who knows? But there are wiser people than we who, years ago, have discovered some of these truths. Maybe we even heard them in our youth. And maybe the trick is to try to recapture, recover some of that for ourselves now. I think that’s part of the excitement.

Question: What advice do you have for today's youth?

Transcript: Well one of the things that I find that I have to say to young people – which is a strange sort of conundrum – is I have to tell them that they are of value. They suffer not from high self-esteem. They suffer, by and large, from low self-esteem. They tend to believe they are the result of this materialistic, mendacious culture. When I am sitting down with young couples who are getting married, I always ask them, “Would you like your marriage to resemble that of your parents?” Invariably they say, “No. Thank you very much. I love my parents. Presumably they love each other, but we hope for something better than this.” So there is a sense that they recognize the limitations of the world in which they are. They tend to over-emphasize their own limitations. And part of my job is to say, “You can aspire to be more than the sum total of your parts. There’s more to you than just a brain, or just a body, or a set of marketable skills.” And I find, rather than trying to deflate their ego, part of my job is to try to raise it up so that they can understand that they are, in the biblical phrase, “created a little lower than the angels”, having been given great power to represent God and ______ the world. That we are images made in God’s image. That there are great things that we can be, and do, and aspire to – that they should do that, especially those who are going to raise families. If you’re not going to do it for yourself, do it for your children for heaven’s sakes! Let them blossom and flourish.

there’s a certain degree of intellectual humility that has to be introduced here. “Oh, things are not going the way they should. Oh woe is me!” Come on! Get off it! Who are you? You think you’re Job? Job dealt with this a long time ago. Of course, most of them have not heard of Job so I introduce them to Job. Part of my job is to try to connect them with . . . to our rich inheritance, our rich history. But the great line, for me, is a line of St. Paul, which I use in nearly all of the baccalaureate sermons that I give – and I give a lot of these across the country. In Romans 12, St. Paul yells and _____ almost literally off the page, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind!” And I say, “Those of you who are privileged to be members of a great university like this, and who have had your minds renewed – even if you didn’t do much about the renewing yourself – simply being here has been a part of this process – you have an opportunity and an obligation to be agents of transformation out there . . . to make things better than they are, to make a difference, to find your place and to exercise that. It may take you a few years. It may take you the rest of your life! But as John Bunyon points out in “Pilgrim’s Progress”, that’s a life worth living – a life in pursuit of some worthwhile, ultimate, and maybe even unobtainable goal – you should do that!” And some of them say, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that.” And of course, my reply, “Why couldn’t you? What talent do you lack? What opportunity is missing? What skills do you think you need in order to do that?” And when they start thinking about the talents, the skills that they have, and the things that they might need, they begin actually to think, “Well what difference might I make? How could I do something about this?” Now surely, that comes with more authority from someone like Bill Gates, who says, “Look. I’m the richest man in the world and I’m screwed up. I didn’t know what I was doing, so surely you can out and find something.” What I was interested in when Bill Gates spoke at Harvard, that not many of the students with whom I spoke said that they wanted to be the richest man in the world. They wanted to find out, given what I have – my talents, my time, my opportunity – what can I do? What can I do to make myself a happier, better person? What can I do to make my world a happier, better place? And in most cases, for most people, it’s a relatively small enterprise. At commencement, it’s customary to say, “You’re going to change the world.” They’re not going to change the world. Let’s be realistic about this. These kids are not going to go out and turn this tired, old world upside down. But there may be certain aspects of your own life that you can attend to, and certain relationships that you can cultivate and encourage . . . certain places where you can make a difference. The trick is to find those places and to do it! And I think people are searching for that, looking for that. That’s what we call looking for meaning, looking for wholeness. Most people experience the brokenness of the world. They wanna do something about it. And my job is to encourage them to do something about it.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Transcript: I haven’t found any scientific advance that explains joy, or happiness, or genuine peace. Or that has achieved perfect satisfaction in mind, body or state. I haven’t found any scientific discovery that’s done that. There was the great cynical observation that when we started exploring outer space, that we might actually find where heaven was. And the Russian cosmonauts were supposed to report back as to whether God existed. Did they find him up there? And nobody did. Or medical science, when it _____ operating on the brain, or the very interior of the human body, could never quite find the soul. They keep looking and they never managed to do it. It seems to me that science could never explain such things as joy, or happiness, or sorrow, even though they try to find the little nodes in the brain in which these emotions are alleged to reside. And thus it seems to me science is able to describe certain realities, but it has it limits. And religion goes beyond those limits. That’s why they call it faith. That’s why it’s exciting. It seems much more exciting to me to be a pioneer on the frontiers of faith, than working out my salvation in some laboratory hoping that I’ll discover something in a jar of chemical unknowns. I think that’s very unlikely.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Question: Does Christianity answer all of your questions?

Transcript: Well Christianity, strangely enough, does answer all my questions. I mean, it’s the lens through which I view reality. It’s how I make judgments. It’s how I respond to others. It’s how I define reality to all intents and purposes. The Christian myth makes sense to me. It provides a world that’s as orderly and stable to me as the . . . as the Greek myths did for the Greeks and the Romans did for the Romans. I . . . I don’t live in a dark world. I mean, I don’t . . . I don’t live in the sense that everything is going to go up in flames, and we’re all destined and doomed, and terrible things are happened . . . happening. But I do believe we live in what the scriptures refer to as a fallen world. Christian theology speaks of it as a world that has not achieved its ideals. And we are struggling, and moving towards them, and trying to manage as best we can. And certain ideas and ideals have been set before us. The person of Jesus Christ, for me, is such an idea and an ideal. I believe He really existed, but that doesn’t diminish the ideological power or the . . . the sense of imagination that is employed. And I aspire to live my life in the light of what I understand that truth to be – a truth which I have received through the wisdom of thousands of other smarter and cleverer people who existed before me. I admit to being a child of the Western Christian experience, and I embrace it. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not embarrassed by it. And I don’t deny my dependency upon it. It’s the vocabulary with which I work.

When I travel, as I often do, through Western Europe and I look at those great cathedrals and those monuments, they all speak to me. They all makes sense to me. It’s describing a world in which I did not live, but which still lives for me. And that’s very important. Part of my work, I suppose, is trying to call back, as best I can, the life of that world and the people that are far removed from it. I’m much comforted by the . . . the remark G.K. _______ once said that “Christianity is not a religion that has been tried and failed. It is a religion that has been wanted and never really tried.” And my job is to try it, and to get other people to try it on for size and hope for the best.

Question: How do you reconcile science and religion?

Transcript: I haven’t found any scientific advance that explains joy, or happiness, or genuine peace. Or that has achieved perfect satisfaction in mind, body or state. I haven’t found any scientific discovery that’s done that. There was the great cynical observation that when we started exploring outer space, that we might actually find where heaven was. And the Russian cosmonauts were supposed to report back as to whether God existed. Did they find him up there? And nobody did. Or medical science, when it _____ operating on the brain, or the very interior of the human body, could never quite find the soul. They keep looking and they never managed to do it. It seems to me that science could never explain such things as joy, or happiness, or sorrow, even though they try to find the little nodes in the brain in which these emotions are alleged to reside. And thus it seems to me science is able to describe certain realities, but it has it limits. And religion goes beyond those limits. That’s why they call it faith. That’s why it’s exciting. It seems much more exciting to me to be a pioneer on the frontiers of faith, than working out my salvation in some laboratory hoping that I’ll discover something in a jar of chemical unknowns. I think that’s very unlikely.

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Transcript: Well I think these young people have been brought up in a culture of enormous wealth, enormous power, enormous opportunity. The least well-off of them is considerably better than the best of their ancestors. I think they recognize that. They see the signs off success – as the world defines success – and opulence on every hand. They’re surrounded by sensation. They’re surrounded by violence. They’re surrounded by politics. None of these are capable of delivering the goods and I think they recognize that. And I think there is a desire to find something that will last, something that will endure, something that will not disappoint. And when you do that, inevitably you are tempted to turn back to the elders, to the wisdom of another age, to something that might not seem to have appealed to you in your earlier phase; but your earlier phase, you recognize, was a deceitful and deceptive one. You ask Harvard graduates where they’re all going, and they’re all going to go . . . 90% of the seniors in any given class say they’re going to three cities. They’re going to go to Washington to put things right: power. They’re going to go to New York to make lots of money: the material world. And they’re going to Los Angeles to have fun: fantasy. And I think they come back from all three of those cities discovering that, like Oz, there’s no there there. Washington is not going to turn the world right side up. All the money in New York doesn’t spare it the troubles and tribulations of living in New York. And all the fantasy from la la land doesn’t dull the pain from living in a life with no meaning and no value. And that’s a modern symbol, I think. People say, “Okay. There must be another way.” Maybe Jerusalem is the place. Maybe a pilgrimage to a holy city is the place. Maybe some ______ somewhere. Maybe sitting under a ____ tree. Who knows? But there are wiser people than we who, years ago, have discovered some of these truths. Maybe we even heard them in our youth. And maybe the trick is to try to recapture, recover some of that for ourselves now. I think that’s part of the excitement.

Question: What advice do you have for today’s youth?

Transcript: Well one of the things that I find that I have to say to young people – which is a strange sort of conundrum – is I have to tell them that they are of value. They suffer not from high self-esteem. They suffer, by and large, from low self-esteem. They tend to believe they are the result of this materialistic, mendacious culture. When I am sitting down with young couples who are getting married, I always ask them, “Would you like your marriage to resemble that of your parents?” Invariably they say, “No. Thank you very much. I love my parents. Presumably they love each other, but we hope for something better than this.” So there is a sense that they recognize the limitations of the world in which they are. They tend to over-emphasize their own limitations. And part of my job is to say, “You can aspire to be more than the sum total of your parts. There’s more to you than just a brain, or just a body, or a set of marketable skills.” And I find, rather than trying to deflate their ego, part of my job is to try to raise it up so that they can understand that they are, in the biblical phrase, “created a little lower than the angels”, having been given great power to represent God and ______ the world. That we are images made in God’s image. That there are great things that we can be, and do, and aspire to – that they should do that, especially those who are going to raise families. If you’re not going to do it for yourself, do it for your children for heaven’s sakes! Let them blossom and flourish.

Question: Collectively, what should we be doing?

Transcript: there’s a certain degree of intellectual humility that has to be introduced here. “Oh, things are not going the way they should. Oh woe is me!” Come on! Get off it! Who are you? You think you’re Job? Job dealt with this a long time ago. Of course, most of them have not heard of Job so I introduce them to Job. Part of my job is to try to connect them with . . . to our rich inheritance, our rich history. But the great line, for me, is a line of St. Paul, which I use in nearly all of the baccalaureate sermons that I give – and I give a lot of these across the country. In Romans 12, St. Paul yells and _____ almost literally off the page, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind!” And I say, “Those of you who are privileged to be members of a great university like this, and who have had your minds renewed – even if you didn’t do much about the renewing yourself – simply being here has been a part of this process – you have an opportunity and an obligation to be agents of transformation out there . . . to make things better than they are, to make a difference, to find your place and to exercise that. It may take you a few years. It may take you the rest of your life! But as John Bunyon points out in “Pilgrim’s Progress”, that’s a life worth living – a life in pursuit of some worthwhile, ultimate, and maybe even unobtainable goal – you should do that!” And some of them say, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that.” And of course, my reply, “Why couldn’t you? What talent do you lack? What opportunity is missing? What skills do you think you need in order to do that?” And when they start thinking about the talents, the skills that they have, and the things that they might need, they begin actually to think, “Well what difference might I make? How could I do something about this?” Now surely, that comes with more authority from someone like Bill Gates, who says, “Look. I’m the richest man in the world and I’m screwed up. I didn’t know what I was doing, so surely you can out and find something.” What I was interested in when Bill Gates spoke at Harvard, that not many of the students with whom I spoke said that they wanted to be the richest man in the world. They wanted to find out, given what I have – my talents, my time, my opportunity – what can I do? What can I do to make myself a happier, better person? What can I do to make my world a happier, better place? And in most cases, for most people, it’s a relatively small enterprise. At commencement, it’s customary to say, “You’re going to change the world.” They’re not going to change the world. Let’s be realistic about this. These kids are not going to go out and turn this tired, old world upside down. But there may be certain aspects of your own life that you can attend to, and certain relationships that you can cultivate and encourage . . . certain places where you can make a difference. The trick is to find those places and to do it! And I think people are searching for that, looking for that. That’s what we call looking for meaning, looking for wholeness. Most people experience the brokenness of the world. They wanna do something about it. And my job is to encourage them to do something about it.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Transcript: Well Christianity, strangely enough, does answer all my questions. I mean, it’s the lens through which I view reality. It’s how I make judgments. It’s how I respond to others. It’s how I define reality to all intents and purposes. The Christian myth makes sense to me. It provides a world that’s as orderly and stable to me as the . . . as the Greek myths did for the Greeks and the Romans did for the Romans. I . . . I don’t live in a dark world. I mean, I don’t . . . I don’t live in the sense that everything is going to go up in flames, and we’re all destined and doomed, and terrible things are happened . . . happening. But I do believe we live in what the scriptures refer to as a fallen world. Christian theology speaks of it as a world that has not achieved its ideals. And we are struggling, and moving towards them, and trying to manage as best we can. And certain ideas and ideals have been set before us. The person of Jesus Christ, for me, is such an idea and an ideal. I believe He really existed, but that doesn’t diminish the ideological power or the . . . the sense of imagination that is employed. And I aspire to live my life in the light of what I understand that truth to be – a truth which I have received through the wisdom of thousands of other smarter and cleverer people who existed before me. I admit to being a child of the Western Christian experience, and I embrace it. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not embarrassed by it. And I don’t deny my dependency upon it. It’s the vocabulary with which I work.

When I travel, as I often do, through Western Europe and I look at those great cathedrals and those monuments, they all speak to me. They all makes sense to me. It’s describing a world in which I did not live, but which still lives for me. And that’s very important. Part of my work, I suppose, is trying to call back, as best I can, the life of that world and the people that are far removed from it. I’m much comforted by the . . . the remark G.K. _______ once said that “Christianity is not a religion that has been tried and failed. It is a religion that has been wanted and never really tried.” And my job is to try it, and to get other people to try it on for size and hope for the best.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Transcript: Well you are touching on a subject very near and dear to me. When I first came to Harvard, there was a great professor here still prowling the grounds named Walter Jackson _______, which may ring true to you. His specialty was the age of Samuel Johnson. And he wrote a great biography of Dr. Johnson which was quite a hit in the early 70s. And in it, he discovered Johnson – that 18th century dictionary man – had a list of three favorite books. And it happened to me that I had read all three of those books and they were my favorite books. So I thought I was in very good company with Dr. Johnson and Professor Walter Jackson _____. The three books were Cervantes’s “Don Quixote”, Defoe’s “Robin Crusoe”, and John Bunyon’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”. I had read all three of them. And I loved how Johnson described his capacity to return to these books for new material all the time. I loved the idealism of Don Quixote . . . the man who could make the most ordinary things appear to be beautiful, for whom windmills represented opportunities for challenge and change – fighting them – and who traveled across with his idealism more or less intact . . . living in his own world in the middle of a reality that was not supportive of his ideals. I liked that. And then I love Robinson Crusoe, because I love the notion of shipwreck and improvisation – having you create your own world out of the ruins of another world. That was a wonderfully appealing sort of sense of adventure. And it even had a diversity in it, “my man Friday”. I mean, we’ve all been aided by somebody we least expected. And there’s something very excited about taking that stuff off the old ship and creating a new civilization, and not having to go back to the old world out of which he had come. And then of course, coming from Plymouth, I loved John Bunyon and the “Pilgrim’s Progress” – the man with the book on his back – the great Baptist with the sense of a purposeful journey long before Rick Warren ever came along. I rather enjoyed this notion that we’re not just lost and wandering tourists. We are people with a destination. And we go through the _________ and we pass through vanity fair, and we deal with all of these terrible struggles, because we are meant for the celestial city. So it was wonderful to see that Dr. Johnson took great comfort from these three books because I always did and continue to do so. So that’s an example of the sort of thing the western Canon, much despised and neglected in these parts, has done for me. It’s given me a vocabulary, a set of images, a world into which I could go. I was an avid reader as a young boy. I read everything I could get my hands on. I had all the little prizes in school for reading the most books in the summer. My name is still on the tablet in the children’s room of the public library because I could consume vast quantities of those orange-backed books. I loved biography. And I had a fertile imagination. I could live in the world of other people. And to those substantial books, I added such wonderful treasures as “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wind in the Willows”, where I always imagined myself to be Mr. Toad putting around in a yellow motorcar. There was a whole world that, in my little town of Plymouth, was not off limits to me because it was the world of books and ideas. And all of those have fed into my imagination, and I think that enriches and stimulates my preaching and my . . . my teaching.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

If you come up with an easy solution to the text, you’re probably close to the wrong thing.

Question: When does interpretation become misinterpretation?

Transcript: That’s a very good question, and I deal with that in my preaching course when I say, “We must remember that it’s not about me. It’s not about you.” And therefore you have to ask this question: “What does the text permit me to say? What are the options available here? How may I . . . How may I . . .” and that’s the operative word. “How may I proceed?” Not, “How can I twist this into something that I wish to say?” Or, “How can I make this fit the agenda of the moment?” And there’s a certain humility – which may not seem to be one of my chief characteristics – but one actually facing the text, the longer one studies, one actually says, “What is here that I am allowed to . . . to deal with?” Which is very different from editorializing or expanding on a particular given point of an argument. You are really looking to see, “What is the subtext here? What is the life that is waiting to be called into being here? And how will it use me, instead of how will I manipulate it or manufacture it to do my bidding?” That’s the hardest thing in preaching, being what an old English _________ used to call “servant of the Word”. We preachers who take our task seriously are literally servants of the Word. The Word is there. We are in the business of trying to find what it wants us, permits us, wills us to say. Which is why preachers at their best are always dependent upon that third, most mysterious member of the blessed and undivided Trinity, the Holy Spirit. And we’re supposed to be listening, and we’re not supposed to speak until we have heard what the . . . what it is we are meant to say.

Question: How do you know when you’ve crossed the line?

Transcript: Well sometimes you don’t know, and that’s the risk of this business. The terrible risk is that you will do some harm because you have the authority, the experience and the capacity to change people’s minds. The prayer I say every Sunday before I enter the pulpit is the same prayer that they say in the medical school. “Lord, let me do no harm.” Let me not use my mind, or my rhetorical skills, or my talent, or my intimacy with the scripture to do something that I shouldn’t be doing. And you always live in the terrible fear that your talents will be misused, particularly by you. That you will . . . because you have the capacity to influence people. There’s a prayer that says, “God help those who speak when many listen.” And I take that very seriously. I speak when many listen. And I could do a tremendous amount of mischief and harm because people will listen to me. So I’m always praying that I do as close to the right thing – at least that I don’t do the wrong thing with this process. I tell some of my preaching students that if it’s easy . . . that if you come up with an easy solution to this text, you’re probably close to the wrong thing. Because the texts are wonderfully ambiguous and difficult and opaque, they don’t leap off the page. And if it suddenly leaps off the page and happens to agree with your most profound prejudice and that of your people, you can almost begin to think, “There’s something wrong here.” And you should be very cautious about proceeding.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Question: What impact does your work have on the world?

Transcript: Well I have it on good authority – that is the people to whom I do preach and the people who take the time to tell me about it over many years – that I make people think. I make them imagine . . . see things that they would not have seen before. Or ask about things that they hadn’t thought about asking before. Or even I have the capacity, I hope, from time to time to lead people to what the theologian calls an “Aha” experience. Or, “I’ve never thought of that before!” Or, “What an interesting notion.” I rejoice in that. It’s the same skill and the same thrill that a teacher gets when somebody finally gets it after you’ve tried to put it before them. That’s the thrill of preaching for me, and I think I have the ability to do that in many cases.

Question: Do you have a creative process?

Transcript: I never give the same sermon twice because I’m never in the same place twice. I’m always reacting. And I’m reacting to the text, I’m reacting to the circumstances, I’m reacting to the congregation. It’s a very different phenomenon every time. So if you’re . . . If you try to give the same sermon twice – and I have tried to do that – it’s a fruitless exercise. You’re simply going in reverse gear. You’re always trying to remember, “Well what worked the last time? How can I get the same effect?” And you’re retrieving instead of advancing. I’d rather the risk of getting it wrong but moving along forward, then recapturing some idealized moment in the past. And I think that’s what – again, to use my musical analogy – I think that’s what conductors do. They do not try to reproduce their ideal moment. They try to make new discoveries along the way, which is why no conductor ever conducts the Beethoven Fifth in the same way. It’s always something new. You’re always discovering something new. When I work with the biblical text, I’m always discovering something I hadn’t seen before. When I talk with people, I’m always hearing things I hadn’t heard before. It is not the “same old, same old” by any stretch of the imagination. And the proof of that for me is I read some of my old sermons and I say, “Oh my goodness! How ever did I say that?” Well it was because I was in a different place than where I am right now. Very unlikely that I would ever repeat an Easter or Christmas sermon, because Easter this year is, for me, very different from Easter last year. It is not standing in the same place and just hoping people will remember and go along. It’s a new chemical reaction. It’s a new sensation. It’s an extraordinary enterprise.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Transcript: “Am I doing the best I can with what I have?” That would be the fundamental question. I’m not asking, “Can I be the best whatever I am?” I’m asking, “Am I making the best use of whatever talents, skills or opportunities that are placed at my disposal?” That’s my question all of the time. Here I’m always asking myself, “I know I am fluent. I know I have a gift for communication. I know I’m good with language and words. Am I using those things as effectively as possible to influence others for the good? Or am I so charmed by my abilities to do this that it’s all about me and not about them or something else?” That, I think, is the question that people with talent and opportunity – and these are the people who will watch something like this, or engage in its production, or will be in its orbit . . . We’re all . . . we all have talents. We all have skills. How are we using those? Do they do good? Are they doing harm? Or are they neutral or indifferent in the way the world operates? That is the question that I ask myself.

When I was a child in the little church I belonged to in Plymouth – a Baptist church – there was a stained glass window in the ceiling of the pulpit. It’s one of the things I looked at frequently when I was ignoring the sermon – one of the great diversions. And it was a great oculus, a great all-seeing eye, a terrifying single eye like on the dollar bill. And I was reminded by one of my Sunday school teachers of Milton’s line about living in my great task master’s eye. And it was always a phenomenon for me knowing that God was looking at me. God knew everything that I had because God had given me everything that I had. Was I using it wisely? Now that may be a rather barbaric and primitive figure which many could dismiss out of hand. But it’s been a very effective device for me. I am accountable. I have been given things. How do I use them? What kind of a steward of my resources, and of my place and time, am I? Those are the questions that concern me. Now they may be the questions of a neurotic Puritan. I doubt it though. And if that’s neurosis, then give me more of it. I think that’s the kind of question that people in positions such as I hold, that people who are watching situations such as this, ought to be asking and ought to be able to answer with some conscience. I’m doing the best I can with what I have.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Question: What advice do you have for today’s youth?

Transcript: Well one of the things that I find that I have to say to young people – which is a strange sort of conundrum – is I have to tell them that they are of value. They suffer not from high self-esteem. They suffer, by and large, from low self-esteem. They tend to believe they are the result of this materialistic, mendacious culture. When I am sitting down with young couples who are getting married, I always ask them, “Would you like your marriage to resemble that of your parents?” Invariably they say, “No. Thank you very much. I love my parents. Presumably they love each other, but we hope for something better than this.” So there is a sense that they recognize the limitations of the world in which they are. They tend to over-emphasize their own limitations. And part of my job is to say, “You can aspire to be more than the sum total of your parts. There’s more to you than just a brain, or just a body, or a set of marketable skills.” And I find, rather than trying to deflate their ego, part of my job is to try to raise it up so that they can understand that they are, in the biblical phrase, “created a little lower than the angels”, having been given great power to represent God and ______ the world. That we are images made in God’s image. That there are great things that we can be, and do, and aspire to – that they should do that, especially those who are going to raise families. If you’re not going to do it for yourself, do it for your children for heaven’s sakes! Let them blossom and flourish.

Question: Collectively, what should we be doing?

Transcript: there’s a certain degree of intellectual humility that has to be introduced here. “Oh, things are not going the way they should. Oh woe is me!” Come on! Get off it! Who are you? You think you’re Job? Job dealt with this a long time ago. Of course, most of them have not heard of Job so I introduce them to Job. Part of my job is to try to connect them with . . . to our rich inheritance, our rich history. But the great line, for me, is a line of St. Paul, which I use in nearly all of the baccalaureate sermons that I give – and I give a lot of these across the country. In Romans 12, St. Paul yells and _____ almost literally off the page, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind!” And I say, “Those of you who are privileged to be members of a great university like this, and who have had your minds renewed – even if you didn’t do much about the renewing yourself – simply being here has been a part of this process – you have an opportunity and an obligation to be agents of transformation out there . . . to make things better than they are, to make a difference, to find your place and to exercise that. It may take you a few years. It may take you the rest of your life! But as John Bunyon points out in “Pilgrim’s Progress”, that’s a life worth living – a life in pursuit of some worthwhile, ultimate, and maybe even unobtainable goal – you should do that!” And some of them say, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that.” And of course, my reply, “Why couldn’t you? What talent do you lack? What opportunity is missing? What skills do you think you need in order to do that?” And when they start thinking about the talents, the skills that they have, and the things that they might need, they begin actually to think, “Well what difference might I make? How could I do something about this?” Now surely, that comes with more authority from someone like Bill Gates, who says, “Look. I’m the richest man in the world and I’m screwed up. I didn’t know what I was doing, so surely you can out and find something.” What I was interested in when Bill Gates spoke at Harvard, that not many of the students with whom I spoke said that they wanted to be the richest man in the world. They wanted to find out, given what I have – my talents, my time, my opportunity – what can I do? What can I do to make myself a happier, better person? What can I do to make my world a happier, better place? And in most cases, for most people, it’s a relatively small enterprise. At commencement, it’s customary to say, “You’re going to change the world.” They’re not going to change the world. Let’s be realistic about this. These kids are not going to go out and turn this tired, old world upside down. But there may be certain aspects of your own life that you can attend to, and certain relationships that you can cultivate and encourage . . . certain places where you can make a difference. The trick is to find those places and to do it! And I think people are searching for that, looking for that. That’s what we call looking for meaning, looking for wholeness. Most people experience the brokenness of the world. They wanna do something about it. And my job is to encourage them to do something about it.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Question: Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the way the world is headed?

Transcript: I am hopeful. There’s a difference between being optimistic and being hopeful. Optimistic suggests that I . . . I expect everything to turn out right and I have good vibes about everything. Hopeful means that, in spite of all the bad things that you really do see, and that really are out there, you take the long view. And in the long view you have confidence that right will out . . . I am hopeful. I have the long view. The short run is rather nasty, brutish and short to quote Mr. _____. And that’s my view of the world. This is a difficult, tough place. And people will, when given the opportunity, usually do the wrong thing. They’ll try everything until the right thing eventually comes along. So I’m not optimistic in the immediate sense that, you know, that I think there will be peace in the Middle East, or that we’ll give up our addiction to oil, or we’ll be nice to our neighbor. I’m not optimistic in that sense. I am hopeful in the long run that we’ll find a way through all these dispiriting realities and unhappy truths . . . we will find a way to make our way through that. And the only way that I can think of that is to think of things that transcend that. That’s why I reread every two years St. Augustine’s “City of God”. There’s a great moral there. There’s a great ideal beyond this fallen world in which we find ourselves. It’s why I still believe in inspirational biographies. I sort of quote Jesse Jackson. You know, “Give hope a chance! Keep hope alive!” and so on and so forth. I’m not altogether sure that the social or political process is the way to do that, but I think people need to be possessed of powerful ideas and ideals ______ almost the impossible thing. Again, Don Quixote kind of gets people moving, and I’m convinced that that hope . . . To be hopeful is to be ultimately realistic in the face of every reason for despair. So that I am, as Mr. Kennedy once described himself, I am an idealist without illusions. I think that’s a lovely phrase.

Question: What gives you hope?

Transcript: Dealing with my students gives me the most hope. I see an enormous range of talent and opportunity in the students that pass through my courses, and through the church, and through the other settings in which I meet young people here and across the country. I have tremendous hope in the rising generation. I believe in them. I believe not only are they, in terms of the initial statistics, smarter than their parents. I believe that they are less capable of being seduced by the talents and the treasures of this world. That they have a higher standard of what they want, and what they feel they deserve, and what the world requires. I look to them to . . . to produce, in some sense, this ideal world. Their parents have had their chance and they’ve squandered it. There’s not much there to be had, it seems to me. But in these young kids that we produce regularly each year out of college despite this one, I believe, is the world’s best chance, the world’s best hope. That gives me cause for encouragement.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Transcript: Well I think these young people have been brought up in a culture of enormous wealth, enormous power, enormous opportunity. The least well-off of them is considerably better than the best of their ancestors. I think they recognize that. They see the signs off success – as the world defines success – and opulence on every hand. They’re surrounded by sensation. They’re surrounded by violence. They’re surrounded by politics. None of these are capable of delivering the goods and I think they recognize that. And I think there is a desire to find something that will last, something that will endure, something that will not disappoint. And when you do that, inevitably you are tempted to turn back to the elders, to the wisdom of another age, to something that might not seem to have appealed to you in your earlier phase; but your earlier phase, you recognize, was a deceitful and deceptive one. You ask Harvard graduates where they’re all going, and they’re all going to go . . . 90% of the seniors in any given class say they’re going to three cities. They’re going to go to Washington to put things right: power. They’re going to go to New York to make lots of money: the material world. And they’re going to Los Angeles to have fun: fantasy. And I think they come back from all three of those cities discovering that, like Oz, there’s no there there. Washington is not going to turn the world right side up. All the money in New York doesn’t spare it the troubles and tribulations of living in New York. And all the fantasy from la la land doesn’t dull the pain from living in a life with no meaning and no value. And that’s a modern symbol, I think. People say, “Okay. There must be another way.” Maybe Jerusalem is the place. Maybe a pilgrimage to a holy city is the place. Maybe some ______ somewhere. Maybe sitting under a ____ tree. Who knows? But there are wiser people than we who, years ago, have discovered some of these truths. Maybe we even heard them in our youth. And maybe the trick is to try to recapture, recover some of that for ourselves now. I think that’s part of the excitement.

Question: How do you explain the resurgence of religion among today’s youth?

Transcript: Well it suggests to me that young people are smarter than we think. They’re not prepared to buy an opinion _______. They are not prepared to put up with the triumph of the material or the mendacious. That even the most indulgent face book patron under 21 is seeking something of value, something of worth, something that will last, something that is permanent and even transforming. And I think that has to do, for example, with the fascination with science fiction, with myth and fantasy. It’s the Harry Potter thing. It’s looking for something that is ultimately true and good. They are not willing to buy the rather grim valueless, godless, spiritual-less universe which some of their elders are quite prepared to sell them. And I think that that suggests a great hunger, a great desire, a great spiritual movement among the cleverest and the most able of our young people. They know better than to be content with less than . . . less than the best. And that’s what they are seeking.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Transcript: Well the trajectory that I see that persists, and that has been present from the very beginning, is the trajectory of curiosity, of desire, and the search for value and meaning. And I think we’ve all been caught up in that. We all want to make sense of where we are. We want where we are to be better than where we were, and we want to be better than we were. There is a fundamental, moral question at the heart of our identity. And I think that has been the common search. All religions have tried to come up with answers to this – a way to frame these questions intelligently and with some system to them. But I think if there’s anything that defines us as human beings is this desire for not simply clarity and understanding. I think we have this desire for meaning, value and purpose. That’s what drives humankind. And if we can’t find it in the things that are around us, we make them up! We invent things. We create things that help us do this. And that . . . I think as long as there are human beings, that will always be a part of who we are. Thus I think religion is unavoidable and ineradicable. It is a part of the human DNA. We are spiritual. We are spiritually seekers.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Question: Does Christianity answer all of your questions?

Transcript: Well Christianity, strangely enough, does answer all my questions. I mean, it’s the lens through which I view reality. It’s how I make judgments. It’s how I respond to others. It’s how I define reality to all intents and purposes. The Christian myth makes sense to me. It provides a world that’s as orderly and stable to me as the . . . as the Greek myths did for the Greeks and the Romans did for the Romans. I . . . I don’t live in a dark world. I mean, I don’t . . . I don’t live in the sense that everything is going to go up in flames, and we’re all destined and doomed, and terrible things are happened . . . happening. But I do believe we live in what the scriptures refer to as a fallen world. Christian theology speaks of it as a world that has not achieved its ideals. And we are struggling, and moving towards them, and trying to manage as best we can. And certain ideas and ideals have been set before us. The person of Jesus Christ, for me, is such an idea and an ideal. I believe He really existed, but that doesn’t diminish the ideological power or the . . . the sense of imagination that is employed. And I aspire to live my life in the light of what I understand that truth to be – a truth which I have received through the wisdom of thousands of other smarter and cleverer people who existed before me. I admit to being a child of the Western Christian experience, and I embrace it. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not embarrassed by it. And I don’t deny my dependency upon it. It’s the vocabulary with which I work.

When I travel, as I often do, through Western Europe and I look at those great cathedrals and those monuments, they all speak to me. They all makes sense to me. It’s describing a world in which I did not live, but which still lives for me. And that’s very important. Part of my work, I suppose, is trying to call back, as best I can, the life of that world and the people that are far removed from it. I’m much comforted by the . . . the remark G.K. _______ once said that “Christianity is not a religion that has been tried and failed. It is a religion that has been wanted and never really tried.” And my job is to try it, and to get other people to try it on for size and hope for the best.

Question: How do you reconcile science and religion?

Transcript: I haven’t found any scientific advance that explains joy, or happiness, or genuine peace. Or that has achieved perfect satisfaction in mind, body or state. I haven’t found any scientific discovery that’s done that. There was the great cynical observation that when we started exploring outer space, that we might actually find where heaven was. And the Russian cosmonauts were supposed to report back as to whether God existed. Did they find him up there? And nobody did. Or medical science, when it _____ operating on the brain, or the very interior of the human body, could never quite find the soul. They keep looking and they never managed to do it. It seems to me that science could never explain such things as joy, or happiness, or sorrow, even though they try to find the little nodes in the brain in which these emotions are alleged to reside. And thus it seems to me science is able to describe certain realities, but it has it limits. And religion goes beyond those limits. That’s why they call it faith. That’s why it’s exciting. It seems much more exciting to me to be a pioneer on the frontiers of faith, than working out my salvation in some laboratory hoping that I’ll discover something in a jar of chemical unknowns. I think that’s very unlikely.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Transcript: It’s always something new. You’re always discovering something new. When I work with the biblical text, I’m always discovering something I hadn’t seen before. When I talk with people, I’m always hearing things I hadn’t heard before. It is not the “same old, same old” by any stretch of the imagination. And the proof of that for me is I read some of my old sermons and I say, “Oh my goodness! How ever did I say that?” Well it was because I was in a different place than where I am right now. Very unlikely that I would ever repeat an Easter or Christmas sermon, because Easter this year is, for me, very different from Easter last year. It is not standing in the same place and just hoping people will remember and go along. It’s a new chemical reaction. It’s a new sensation. It’s an extraordinary enterprise.

I never give the same sermon twice because I’m never in the same place twice. I’m always reacting. And I’m reacting to the text, I’m reacting to the circumstances, I’m reacting to the congregation. It’s a very different phenomenon every time. So if you’re . . . If you try to give the same sermon twice – and I have tried to do that – it’s a fruitless exercise. You’re simply going in reverse gear. You’re always trying to remember, “Well what worked the last time? How can I get the same effect?” And you’re retrieving instead of advancing. I’d rather the risk of getting it wrong but moving along forward, then recapturing some idealized moment in the past. And I think that’s what – again, to use my musical analogy – I think that’s what conductors do. They do not try to reproduce their ideal moment. They try to make new discoveries along the way, which is why no conductor ever conducts the Beethoven Fifth in the same way.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Question: What impact does your work have on the world?

Transcript: Well I have it on good authority – that is the people to whom I do preach and the people who take the time to tell me about it over many years – that I make people think. I make them imagine . . . see things that they would not have seen before. Or ask about things that they hadn’t thought about asking before. Or even I have the capacity, I hope, from time to time to lead people to what the theologian calls an “Aha” experience. Or, “I’ve never thought of that before!” Or, “What an interesting notion.” I rejoice in that. It’s the same skill and the same thrill that a teacher gets when somebody finally gets it after you’ve tried to put it before them. That’s the thrill of preaching for me, and I think I have the ability to do that in many cases.

Question: How do you reach your congregation?

Transcript: Well one thing that I have to remind myself and anybody else is that different people have different “Aha” moments at different stages along the way – some of which I may be responsible for, and some of which I may have absolutely nothing to do with. But I’m prepared to gamble that there is a kind of common expectation out there. And my job is to try to conduct those expectations. Rather than a soloist, I always think of myself as an orchestra conductor. I have all these instruments to try to bring together in some coherent sound. And preaching, for me, is very much like conducting. It’s not like arguing as lawyers do, or shouting as politicians do. It is trying to bring together feelings and passions and ideas that are already there – trying to ignite them in some intelligible way. So the conducting image from my musical background is very much a part of how I see preaching.

Question: What is your legacy?

Transcript: Well that is not an easy question, which is why you doubtless put it to me. I hope that I will always be thought of as a thoughtful preacher, that I took the life and the mind seriously, that I didn’t toy with people’s emotions, that I worked very hard in trying to find the right words to convey the right ideas. I’d like people to think that that’s what I did and that I did it well – that I did it over a long period of time in a wide variety of places. It would please me to be thought of as effective both in an exalted place like the Memorial Church of Harvard University, and in a very modest pulpit like South Pond Chapel in the dark woods of Plymouth, Massachusetts – that I was, in those remarkably different settings, to make people think, and to cause them to react and to respond. That’s what I’m interested in. And I would hope that that would be the legacy that I would leave behind. “He made us think” would be a very nice epitaph.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Question: Beyond a simple title, how would you describe what you do for a living?

Transcript: I’m a preacher who teaches, as opposed to a teacher who preaches. I . . . Everything that I am is defined by my Christian belief and my Christian experience. And everything that I do stems from that, whether it’s preaching or teaching or counseling, or whatever else goes with the territory. People have asked me, “Well what are you? How would you define yourself? What is your . . . your ultimate label?” My ultimate label is a believing Christian.

My mind is not a hole. My mind is an interesting place – reasonably well furnished – and it ranges up and down a whole host of avenues. But I continue to hold fast to the faith in which I was brought up. And I like to present it as an interesting challenge to people who are smarter than I am. That’s the fun of being the Harvard preacher. I preach to people who are infinitely smarter than I am. I know more than they do, but they are smarter than I am. And that is great fun – trying to take them as far as you can before they overtake you.

Question: How would you describe your preaching style?

Transcript: I think I’m a very literate preacher. I like language. I love words, and I like to make words dance and do things. And I like to cause people to think about how these words are contributing to these ideas, and for words to dance in their own heads. So in that sense, I . . . it’s an odd description, but I think I’m a “wordy” preacher. Words are very important to me. The right word at the right time, fitly spoken, in my view is the most powerful engine on earth. So I take very great care with the words and the language I use, and how I put words together. And I think it’s no accident that one of the great Greek words, “logos”, means “word”. And Jesus is often described as “the Word” – the Word incarnate. I’m an incarnational preacher. I try to bring words, ideas and concepts to life. And that’s, for me, the glory of language, the glory of rhetoric. That’s what I do.

Recorded on: 6/12/07

Transcript: My name is Peter Gomes. And I’m the Pusey minister in the Memorial Church, and a _______ Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University.

Question: Where are you from and how has that shaped you?

Transcript: Well I was brought up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, which is an old town . . . a really Yankee incarnation. And most of the black people that I knew growing up looked and sounded and talked just as I do, which may seem peculiar to many people. But that is part of the local inheritance. I think we are as native there as salt cod or blueberries or cranberries, and that’s how it is. And the term “Afro-Saxon” was coined by a colleague of mine here not entirely as a compliment. But I have always taken it as an apt description of the world in which I grew up. Because my family was very much conscious of our race. I think it could be said that my momma was a race woman. She had a very high notion of our race, and I was never brought up to think other . . . otherwise for myself. I remember she once said, “You must always remember you were descended from kings!” Well I thought that was wonderful. Of course she meant African princes and African kings. But we could never document that. I suspect the time will come when the truth will really be known. But it’s not a small thing for a little boy to think he was the descendant of kings. So I never had any ego problems with my identity; but the culture – even though I was, no doubt, a descendant of Africans – the culture was a very Yankee, New England, Puritan, Anglo-Saxon culture and I took to it. I absorbed it – mainlined it as you might say. And that, I think, is what my genial critic referred to when he described me as the first Afro-Saxon that he had ever known. Now I think he meant by that that I was lacking in sufficient, readily identifiable African . . . or American black ethnic qualities. My speech doesn’t conform to what people think is standard African-American speech. And that my values seem derived from the local countryside as opposed to a more, shall we say, southern or African . . . African-American identified ______. It didn’t help that I went to college in Maine, which was even more central to the Yankee myth and even of Plymouth itself. And of course I spent all of my career here in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard college, which is, of course, the institutional expression of all that. So for better or worse, as the kids like to say, “It is what it is! I am what I am! I am what I am”. And it confuses people, which gives me great pleasure.

Question: How did your mother influence you?

Transcript: She was a preacher’s daughter . . . the only daughter of a prominent preacher here in Cambridge at the turn of the 19th century. And she had a rather grand view of herself and hence me. And I think I have inherited that. But it was full of all of these, “To whom much is given, much is expected.” “Handsome is as handsome does.” All the Victorian virtues which she had, I inherited, I think, through my mother’s milk and didn’t challenge them by and large. I accepted them. Her view was that great things would be expected of me, and I must live into them. There was no doubt that the sun shone on me. I was an only child, and therefore there were a set of expectations and obligations and responsibilities. I must always do the right thing, whatever that was. I must always do my duty. And since I was her only child, I was the object of her total attention, and that was considerable. And I regarded her as my best teacher and my wisest counselor. And in most instances, except for the odd moment of teenage rebellion, as my best friend. She was a great soul to me.

She was a preacher’s daughter. And preacher’s daughters always had ambiguous relationships toward the clergy. Her father – her “Papa”, to whom she was devoted – died at a very early age in his 40s. And I think she always blamed the church for doing her father in. He worked too hard. There were too many rivals for his affection and his duties. So I’m not altogether sure she liked the church. I’m not even altogether sure she liked the clergy. But she liked me, and she thought it was a respectable, honorable calling and that I was well suited to it. So she rather enjoyed being the minister’s mother, and I think expected me to make that calling a useful one for her as well as for me. In a way, I always thought my job was to redeem the church which had disappointed her, and which had treated her father not as well as she thought he should have been treated. I never knew my grandfather, so I never knew how accurate that really was; but I certainly got that impression.

Question: When did the ministry first spark your interest?

Transcript: Well I had grown up with everybody else’s expectations. And so when you reach a certain age, you decide whether you own those expectations or you reject them. And I first rejected them because everybody thought I was going to be a preacher. I sounded like one. I looked like one. I acted like one. I enjoyed church. It was fun. I could memorize vast quantities of scripture. I could play the part perfectly. But there was a point where I wondered, “Is this the part I really want to play, or am I simply conforming to everybody’s expectations?” So when I went off to college, it was with the view in my own mind that I was going to test this, and that I was going to become my own person. I was not going to be the fair-haired boy who went off to college and became what everybody thought he was going to be – the great preacher. So when I went off to Bates, I did not major in religion. I played the organ, which is a wonderfully godless vocation. You could be in church and not lead anything. And I thought I was so smart because I was quicker than most of the poor, plodding preachers I listened to. And I was what _____ called one of the “cultured despises of religion”. It was only when I came to Harvard Divinity School – and I only came here on something of a gamble – that I actually saw very bright people whom I respected who were also very devout people. And I had known bright people who were profane. And I had known pious people who were not very bright. And I wanted, above all, to be thought of as a thinking man. That’s why I majored in history. That’s why I didn’t hang around the religious types in college. And it was why I thought I wanted my own world view, which was as a, I think, a reasonably thoughtful historian of sort of my field in college – history. And I was going to go into the museum world where I could indulge my passion for beautiful things and elegant commentary in a stable world such as the museum. That was what I really thought I aspired to. But when I came to Harvard, I found that there was more religion in me than I had imagined. Harvard was . . . I may be the first and only graduate of Harvard Divinity School who ever found religion here; but it was a great moment for me. It was the place where the two parts of my life – my mind and my heart – came together. So I shall always be grateful to Harvard for that. But I think it was here that it was clear to me that this was one of the few things that I was probably good at. It was one of the few things that presented both a joy and a challenge to me. And I didn’t have to be everybody’s image of what a preacher was. I could be my own image of what a preacher was. And I have been a singular person. I think most people who reflect on me and on the ministry would have a very hard time trying to find exactly where I fit in the whole system. And I’m frankly . . . I’m rejoiced in confounding people’s expectations and their experiences.

Recorded on: 6/12/07