Dear Richard, thanks for the heads-up. It turns out that I saw/heard the Newshour before I got your email (KQED simultaneously broadcasts the program on TV and radio -- I was painting the hallway at the time). Congratulations! I thought you did a great job of sketching out the whole business. I was particularly struck by your last comment regarding secular millenialists: all destruction and no redemption. That dynamic has played itself out in a curious way in the first-year seminar course that looks, for its last unit, to the future: where are we going? Over the years most of the students have come away depressed from the course -- in spite of the fact that many of them would claim to be Christian. I have often given a lecture in that unit that highlights several responses to death, as it happens, using as a template the characters in Bergman's Seventh Seal (that I would claim at least implicitly point to a transcendent hope) and Monty Python's Life of Brian (the final scene, Look on the Bright Side of Life -- an eloquent statement of cynical hopelessness). This semester, as part of some kind of test of our pedagogical principles, we administered an in-class essay dealing with the future: the topic was set up with a doom-and-gloom quotation, and not surprisingly, I got nothing but terrified and hopeless views on the future. Not a speck of hope among them. I wonder if there isn't something more titillating about that hopeless prognosis.
In any case, I look forward to meeting you at Leeds and discussing these things further!
With hope for the future,
Mark A. Zier
University Chaplain
University of the Pacific
3601 Pacific Avenue
Stockton, CA 95211
tel. 209-946-2325
fax 209-946-2821
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<<< Richard Landes 12/22 4:18p >>>
Some of you have asked me to warn you when i will next be on a program.
This evening's newshour with jim lehrer has an extensive piece on me and
the CMS. also for those in the bay area next monday 10 AM there will be a
program on KQED on the year 1000 with me and Geoffrey Koziol.
richard
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