The Secular and the Sacred in Higher Education

The Secular and the Sacred in Higher Education

Opening Remarks and Acknowledgments

In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate. Peace on all the Prophets and on our Prophet Muhammad. I want to first of all thank the NYU and Dr. Sexton, and also Dr. Serene Jones, all the people involved in enabling this event.

I'm honored to be here. Dr. Sexton actually honored us by coming out and supporting our college recently, and so this is a, it wasn't quid pro quo, but I'm happy to be here.

The Perennial Topic: Sacred and Secular

The topic tonight, the idea of the sacred and secular, is obviously a perennial topic. Secularism is the dominant modality by which we view our world today in many places, although there are still several societies that are theocentric, that tend to view through the lens of the sacred. Certainly India is one of those societies where Hinduism still deeply pervades the culture, and certainly in many parts of the Muslim world. Turkey is, in a way, there is a type of sacred consciousness that's being reawakened.

If it was ever dormant, but it was certainly suppressed for a long time under a type of laicist government. The United States, although we are a secular government, we have never seen the sacred as something that was not permitted or even encouraged to be part of the public sphere. Certainly we have a long history of very devout public servants, presidents.

If you read Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, if somebody tried to get away with that today, he would be completely ridden out of town as a religious fanatic.

The Liberal Arts and Sacred Roots

But when we talk about the liberal arts, for me the subject is certainly a subject that involves the sacred, because the roots of the liberal art are profoundly sacred roots. In the Muslim community, when you talk about the liberal arts, there is often a blank stare.

I think a lot of Muslims think that liberal arts means that you're going to vote for Bernie Sanders and that you're learning basket weaving or painting or some craft. And so it's very difficult, especially in a culture that was defeated by, in the view of many, many Muslims, superior technology. And so the STEM areas of study have become an obsession in the Muslim world, despite the fact that it has a profoundly humanistic tradition.

And in The Rise of Colleges, George Makdisi actually argues that much of the humanistic tradition that comes into Western civilization came through the vehicle of Muslim civilization. George Sarton is another one that

makes similar arguments. And Mehdi Nakosteen, who did a very important PhD at the University of Colorado, called The Islamic Origins of Western Education.

And there is certainly a huge influence. So what I'd like to do is just look at this idea from a Muslim perspective, the liberal arts reviving a forgotten tradition amongst the Muslims.

The Mystical Origins of Liberal Arts

The origin of the liberal arts is a mystical origin. Some will attribute it to Pythagoras, who was certainly working in an esoteric tradition that was a hidden tradition. Even Plato, the Platonic tradition, which heavily involves the liberal arts. Plato, in his seventh letter, actually says that he never spoke openly about his real doctrine, which obviously leads to a lot of speculation.

Historical Islamic Educational Institutions

But if you look at the history of the liberal arts in the Muslim world, one of the earliest colleges established was Zaytuna College in Tunisia, which still exists. It was established in 731. The Qarawiyyin University in Morocco, some consider it the oldest university in the world. It was 859 in the Christian era, the Common Era. It was founded by a woman, Fatima al-Fihriyya. She was an educated woman.

Al-Azhar University, founded by the Ismaili Fatimid dynasty and later becomes a Sunni college. It's still functioning as a university, founded in 970 in Egypt. One of the most extraordinary universities is the University of Timbuktu.

The Legacy of Timbuktu

If you read Rodney's book on how Europe underdeveloped Africa, an argument that he makes is that Africa was actually a highly educated society, and that's certainly true for West Africa and Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa. You will find that Timbuktu was an extraordinary center of learning. I just want to call attention to certain people.

This is a picture of Dr. Mahmoud Zouber, who studied with my teacher in the 1950s in West Africa, in Mauritania. He's originally from Mali. He went on to get a PhD from the Sorbonne. His PhD dissertation was on one of the greatest scholars that Timbuktu produced, Ahmed Baba al-Timbukti. But he also was one of the badass librarians of Timbuktu, because this book by Joshua Hammer is about how Dr. Zouber and his student in Timbuktu actually saved over 300,000 manuscripts of all different knowledges, handwritten manuscripts, many of them hundreds of years old. They were smuggled out when the Black Flags took over Timbuktu, because they were so fearful that they would burn them.

As these fanatics got closer to Timbuktu, they hid all of the manuscripts in people's houses under beds to preserve them, because they were so fearful of them being destroyed. Well, with the help of some Europeans

that provided containers, they smuggled 300,000 manuscripts out of Timbuktu down to the capital of Mali, where they have not been restored to Timbuktu. But the library of Timbuktu was a famous library.

I actually visited Timbuktu, almost died in Timbuktu by getting amoebic dysentery. I was saved by some French tourists who happened to have flagellum with them. So I owe my life to a French tourist. I must always speak kindly about the French.

The Umayyad College is a great college in Damascus, and I could go on. There are many colleges throughout the Muslim world.

The Curriculum: Trivium and Quadrivium

But the subjects that were taught, obviously revelation was a very important subject, but revelation was predicated on an understanding of what we call in the West the trivium, the Muslims called them the three arts. They called them the instrumental arts. And this was absolutely foundational.

It is still taught. I studied this in the Muslim world when I did my college studies in traditional madrasa. People wonder what goes on in a madrasa. They're actually studying the trivium in most madrasas. And so it's unfortunate that they have this idea that somehow they're producing terrorists.

The quadrivium is the other half. And people, unfortunately, because of Wilhelm Dilthey, who was a brilliant scholar from Germany, about over 100 years ago, he divided knowledge into the natural sciences and the humanities, which unfortunately is a false dichotomy because the humanities, humanitas, was actually the Latin translation of paideia from the Greek. And it was actually both sides of the knowledge, the qualitative and the quantitative. But this was lost with this demarcation that has led people to think now that the liberal arts are the humanities, meaning literature and philosophy and these things.

But traditionally, the liberal arts were seen as both sides, the qualitative and the quantitative sciences. So this was extremely important.

The Components of Classical Education

The trivium was grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Grammar involved not simply grammar, learning the parts of speech, but also literature and the idea of what they call in rhetoric copia, of learning through reading, getting a vast fund of expression because you've read great literature. So it was very important. And then obviously logic and rhetoric.

The revealed religion involved law, jurisprudence, theology, and then understanding the Quran and the Hadith through these interpretive skills, prophetic tradition. But the quadrivium, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi says that all of knowledge is based on these two fields, of knowing the three arts of language and the four arts of number, arithmetic, geometry, harmony, and astronomy.

Three Specializations in Pre-Modern Education

This led, in the pre-modern world, this is true for the Muslim world as well as Europe and the Christian tradition and the Jewish tradition to a large extent. It led to three specializations. This is what they called episteme or scientia, which was the specialization after paideia, after this foundation in these arts. And law and politics was to heal the social body.

Theology, philosophy, which involved ethics and psychology. Freud did not invent psychology. A lot of people don't realize that. But psychology is an ancient science. If you read some of the ancient writings, the Muslims had incredible insights into Sidi Ahmed Zarruq, a scholar who died in 1492, talks about obsessive-compulsive behavior, people that wash their hands constantly, and he talks about it being a type of mental pathology. But this was to heal the mental and spiritual body.

And then medicine was to heal the physical body. And this was a holistic understanding of what this specialization involved in order that you had a healthy social body, a healthy spiritual body, and a healthy physical body.

The European Adoption of Liberal Arts

As the liberal arts moves into Europe, a rediscovery of these things, you get these great teaching institutions that Makdisi argues are probably the result of Europeans going into the Muslim world during the Crusades and discovering these incredible institutions and bringing these ideas back to Europe.

And there's a great deal of evidence. I would recommend reading his book if you're interested in pursuing this. But all of these great institutions in Italy, in England, places like Oxford and Cambridge, they were rooted in the sacred.

American Imitations of European Institutions

And this led to the great imitations in America. We forget this is New York. We forget that Cambridge, which is where Harvard is, is called Cambridge. Princeton. These were attempts at replicating these great institutions.

John Harvard studied at Oxford and donated his library and the land to start Harvard College because he wanted to produce scholars so that we didn't have to go to England to learn the liberal arts.

And so these are the great liberal arts institutions, but they were sacred institutions. All of them were founded as seminaries, primarily to train people of the cloth.

Early American Islamic Connections

It's very interesting. Harvard was teaching Arabic 200 years ago, and George Bethune English, the very first Muslim that I found, the American who converted to Islam, George Bethune English, I discovered him by

reading the letters of Jefferson and Adams. Jefferson actually mentions that he read Bethune English's book on his travelogue up the Nile River. And in a footnote it said, this is an early convert to Islam.

He was born in 1787, distinguished himself at Harvard with a master's degree, which was the highest degree then, but he learned Arabic at Harvard. And if you want to see something fascinating, Noah Webster, the first American dictionary published in 1828, has several Arabic words in it because Noah Webster was trying to prove that English went back to Hebrew, but he actually found that there were many cognates from Arabic, and so he would actually mention the Arabic word with Arabic script, and I wondered where they got such good typography in the United States at that time.

African American Liberal Arts Colleges

So another aspect is these great African American liberal arts colleges that were founded, the great Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Tuskegee, these were great colleges where they were training African Americans in this tradition.

W.E.B. Du Bois, who I love, and I think he's a voice that's very important today, he said, the riddle of existence is the college curriculum. That was laid before the pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and the quadrivium, and is today laid before the freedmen's sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change. Its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer, but the true college will ever have one goal, not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.

And that is a beautiful articulation of the purpose of a liberal arts education. He was a great liberal artist. He actually left a relatively progressive environment in Massachusetts to go to the south to teach in Atlanta and spent several years there teaching.

Du Bois and Washington's Different Approaches

He disagreed with Booker T. Washington who wanted African Americans to learn trades and become technicians and study the industrial arts. W.E.B. Du Bois had this idea of the talented tenth that one out of every ten African Americans should master the liberal arts and show their intellectual prowess so that they could become equal intellectually to a people that were telling them that they were inferior.

The Secret of Liberal Arts Education

I think this is a popular book, but one of the things that struck me about this book was Fareed Zakaria said that when he left India, which is education largely by rote memorization, not much critical theory, and came to Harvard, he was shocked to be introduced into this idea of a liberal education. And he said at a time when America is abandoning this type of education and putting more emphasis on vocational and STEM research, he

said places like India are realizing maybe this is the secret of America's power and they're getting more interested in studying this.

We forget that 2% of people in the United States are studying at liberal arts colleges, and yet almost 20% of the most influential people in the United States have liberal arts degrees. And so this is a very significant point that I think needs to be emphasized. So I could go on. I'm going to go through these.

Five Paradigms of Liberal Arts

Daniel Denicola argues that there's five paradigms for the liberal arts, and it's become a contested term, but the traditional idea was largely the acquisition of the skills of learning and the transmission of cultural inheritance across generations. There are other now understandings that really come from those first two, understanding the world that you're in, the forces that shape your life, self-actualization, which is now more popular, and finally activism and engagement. So a lot of liberal arts colleges now produce a lot of activists and people that are more engaged with the world.

Zaytuna College: Reviving the Tradition

So Zaytuna College is our attempt at reviving this tradition, which was very powerful and I think gave the Muslim world incredible creativity. And Arnold Toynbee argues that civilizations rise and fall based on how they respond to the challenges. If they have a critical mass of a creative minority, this is what he called them, a creative minority that are able to grapple with the problems that are facing them, then they can find creative solutions to those problems.

That creative imagination comes through deep reflection. A contemplative period of time is needed to do this. And Joseph Pieper, who wrote a beautiful book on leisure, makes an argument for the contemplative that every society needs people to think deeply about their problems.

The Importance of Authenticity

This is also Susan Cain, who wrote a beautiful book called Quiet, about the importance of the introvert, that so much of our culture now is about extroversion. It's about presenting yourself. It's about becoming a winning personality and learning all these tricks to influence people.

I read a book recently, and one of the lines in it was, it takes real practice to appear authentic. And I just thought that was just so bizarre. But this is the idea that is really pushed on so many young people now to learn this.

The liberal arts tradition is actually, it's to discover your authentic self. It's not to practice authenticity. It's to actually go into the self.

Establishing Zaytuna College

And so we've established Zaytuna College. We were fortunate to buy a beautiful red brick building, which was

part of the Pacific School of Religion. And then we bought also a seminary of the Franciscans that was originally a Jewish frat house. Then it became a Franciscan college, and now it's a Muslim college, so it's gone through the Abrahamic progress.

The Crisis of Knowledge

So the crisis of knowledge, the real crisis that we have, I believe, is a metaphysical crisis. One of the gravest problems that we face is the fact that scientism, and this idea that empirical knowledge is the only true knowledge, and the idea somehow that speculative knowledge reflective knowledge, knowledge that comes through deductive reasoning with universals, is no longer a valid form of knowing.

This comes from August Comte and others, and this is a long, long discussion, so I can't go into it.

Bayard Dodge on Medieval Muslim Education

But Bayard Dodge, who was the president of the Protestant University in Beirut, a brilliant scholar, Bayard Dodge wrote a book on medieval Muslim education, and in it he argued that the Muslim education of the Middle Ages is rapidly being superseded by schools and universities which are both modern and secular. The widespread movement is so recent that it is impossible to tell how it will affect the cultural and social life of Islam. It is clear, however, that in this age of chaotic change, when members of the rising generation are confused by bewildering doubts, the reformists must not neglect the basic principles of medieval education, which were a search of spiritual truth and faith in the reality of Allah.

I consider this to be just an incredibly important statement by somebody who made this statement over 60 years ago, and I think we're now seeing the results in the Muslim world of the fact that education has completely ignored this side, and you've had reactions that are gross and actually heinous because of that.

The Umayyad Mosque and College in Aleppo, one of the most beautiful architectural testimonies, is now a rubble heap because of this forgotten tradition. This is my real belief that it's something that they've forgotten.

The Journey from Data to Wisdom

I could go into this, maybe we can talk a little bit about this, but the importance of knowledge. When we think, the scholastics had this idea of what they called the Theia Thaumata, that God has these divine intentions, and that meaning is imprinted on the human being, and that meaning comes through form, and it comes through the interaction of the mind with form, and data is a Latin word which means what's given.

Who gave it to us? Fact is from factum, which is what is made. Who made it? These are ancient ideas that facts are not something we create or make up. They're discovered by our minds, and then they're organized into knowledge.

So data and information, which is what much of our modern education involves, organization of data and information becomes knowledge, but knowledge then has to become understanding, and understanding has to evolve into wisdom. How do we use that knowledge? Do we use our airplanes to dwarf great distances, or do we use them to bomb people that have no self-defense? How do we use the incredible knowledge of chemistry that we have to create napalm or to create bombs and salves that heal our bodies?

These are real problems that we're dealing with today, and so grammar was that, the knowledge. Logic was the idea of the understanding, but then rhetoric was the wisdom. Rhetoric was not a bag of tricks that you learned to influence people and win friends. Rhetoric was the way that you expressed the truth of your knowledge and your understanding.

Botticelli's Depiction of Liberal Arts

This is a beautiful picture by Botticelli, a young man being introduced to the seven liberal arts. The liberal arts were always personified as women in the Western tradition because men were the students, and men pursue women, and so these were the beauties to pursue. And you have, who's leading this young man in? Grammar. And then over them is prudentia, wisdom.

So you learn these seven sisters to be presided over by wisdom, but grammar was the entrance into the liberal arts.

The Importance of Grammar

So to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, yes, a winky face is correct, but in ancient times, the semicolon was actually used to separate archaic written devices known as complete sentences. And if you think that's a joke, you have not taught composition in college recently.

Closing Warning: The Decline of Civilization

Ignorance, and I need to conclude because I want Dr. Sexton to have his time. Ignorance, compound and simple ignorance. I'll just end by saying that I truly believe that if we don't restore the vision of the liberal arts tradition to its proper place at the heart of the intellectual and spiritual pursuits of our civilization, then we will continue to watch as our civilization declines and falls.

The trends and consequences are clearly evident. Our elite further isolate themselves in distant places. Our inner cities become military theaters of engagement. Our poor schools remain juvenile halls for hapless youth, while our top-tier schools continue to serve as recruiting centers for what could really be arguably called sociopathic corporate enterprises that devastate the global commons, destroy our oceans, and devour what remains of the great forests and jungles of the world.

The Mansion with Many Windows

And that dialogic dialogue allowed you to look at the world not through the one window you were given by birth, but through the many windows of the mansion. And enrich your own view of self. Never giving up your own space, but enriching it.

And that's what this word ecumenism meant theologically for John XXIII, but when we've used it here at NYU to refer to a secular university, we've meant it in a more heuristic, secular sense. It's still a heuristic word. It's still a way of looking at the world.

But one doesn't have to take. Now we're here in an event that's sponsored by many, and it celebrates the work of many, which is an ecumenical work. And we're here, gathered most of us in the room, I would assume, like me, like them, taking religion as a serious part of our lives, as speaking to the deepest part of our lives.

Ecumenism in a Secular Context

But ecumenism, this heuristic is much broader and can be seen simply as a way of looking at diversity in the world. And it's in that sense we began to use it here at NYU, a secular university.

How does this play into what we see going on around us in the world, the large trends of the world? We are, the three of us, theologians, so we don't think even election cycle to election cycle, let alone debate to debate. We think in centuries, the large arc of history that we hope is, as Martin Luther King said, bending towards justice. We're certainly hopeful of that. We're inherently optimistic about the future because we believe in the inner worthiness of human beings.

Two Global Trends: Fear or Embrace

So what are the large trends that are relevant to universities today? First, undeniably, the world is miniaturizing. All of the constraints that separated us physically from each other are disappearing. We each are in each other's lives, no matter how remote we are from each other.

So how do we react to this? Some people react with fear. Some people choose fear. And there's kind of that latent triumphalism that was captured in that phrase, extra ecclesiam nullus salus. Outside my group, there is no worthiness. There is no salvation. And we attempt, out of fear, nativism, if you want to call it that, which is a deep strain in America, we attempt to gate ourselves off.

Gating strategies, whether they be gated neighborhoods or, as some would suggest, gated nations.

The second reaction is the reaction of embrace. The delight in the fact, in the spirit of John XXIII, in the spirit of ecumenism, that someone who sees the world and me differently from the way I do, what a delight that is.

How much I can learn from that.

NYU's Theory of Community

Now, in a way, the theory of our university here at NYU, captured in many's agenda, but permeating, I hope, the entire university, is the second of those reactions. It's affirming the power of community.

Yes, I have an identity. But at NYU, that identity isn't found in some overarching notion of homogeneity and community. We don't gather in big stadia or arenas wearing the same colors with cheerleaders having us chant in unison, pretending to be the same.

To us, that seems very old. Very kind of 1950s. It belongs back in that small classroom in Brooklyn where even a great man thought small about the word community.

We give you here at NYU hard community. It's hard to find community at NYU unless you look for it and work at it. And we would rather assert the complex community that can be the joy of an ecumenical world.

A community of communities where we all become parts of micro-communities within the overarching entity, and then we interlock the way of many has us interlocking. We interlock, creating a whole that's greater than the sum of the parts, creating something like a watch where the elements are still identifiable, but where there's something greater that's come out of the aggregation of the elements.

So that's the first broad trend, and I think the way we as a university and universities generally could react to it.

The Death of Thought

But there's another broad trend, and I hope you'll see here a connection both to the first and to Hamza's remarkably wise talk. We're on the verge of seeing the death of thought, the death of thought, certainly the trivium, maybe also the quadrivium, because some would say we're moving into a post-factual, a post-factual period. But certainly you've seen, and I first wrote about this. You can go to my website and see a piece I wrote over a decade ago, 12 years ago, after the 2004 election. I began to worry that America was developing what I called then an allergy to nuance and complexity.

We wanted very simple answers. Best of all, we wanted a ranking. Give us a ranking. I remember discussing with an NYU trustee who owned a magazine that provided extensive rankings of colleges and universities and it was the first time I'd met him. I was a relatively new dean, and he came up to me and said, Dean, I understand that you're against rankings. And I said, they're an abomination. And he said to me, why should the consumer have less information on the purchase of an education than on the purchase of a toaster?

And I said, why does NYU have a trustee who thinks an education is like a toaster? And I said, what are you going to do next? What are you going to do next? Rank religions? Give us a nice ranking to let us know who's best, or at least who this week is best.

The Danger of Scientism

But this allergy to nuance and complexity, which is of course what thought is. We do nuance and complexity at universities. Inevitably leads to a world where the corollary, lack of trust, develops.

Because we engage with each other through conversation in a trusting way. We have to develop common ground. And of course, the next step is the devaluation about which Hamza worried of the spiritual.

There are some here tonight who have been kind enough to tell me you've read my book, Baseball as a Road to God. It's interesting. If you read Baseball as a Road to God, which I could only write after Lisa's death, because I could only be public about my spirituality then, you'll see that it's really not a book about baseball, and it's really not a book about God.

It's a book about, and the word I use in the book is a word that Hamza used, scientism and the danger of scientism, the danger of making science into a religion that is the only true religion, the triumphalism.

Three Categories of Knowledge

Now, Heschel told us that there is the known, and we impart that hopefully to our students. We have experts here on what is known and what we have cognitively, and we should give every bit of that that we have to our students.

And then, because we are a research university, there's the knowable but not yet known. The knowable but not yet known. And that's, of course, what a research university does. It discovers the next generation of knowledge, and that becomes part of the virtuous cycle of imparting.

But then, and this was at the essence of what Hamza said, I think, then there is a third category, which is neither known or knowable but not yet known, if we mean by known, known in our cognitive terms. That's where scientism comes in. If you end the block there, if it's all capable of knowledge through science, then you've left out perhaps the most important, and that is those things that are ineffable, ineffable. Beyond our putting into words they're so deep, like love, love, the meaning of life, the fact that there is a dimension called the spiritual, the fact that there is a God, not necessarily an anthropomorphic or interventionist God, although perhaps even that, but something that goes beyond our capacity for words that all the great religions describe as God.

The Danger of Pride

And we need, as we approach that, to approach that third category that goes beyond science with deep humility and never with the triumphalism of extra ecclesiam nulla salus, because that displays a pride which is the Greek tragic flaw of hubris taken to its extreme.

So it is that it brings great pleasure to me every time I walk into my new office on the fifth floor of the student center here. I always enter through, or most of the time I enter through, the spiritual life center, because it's

wonderful for me to see the activity there. It's wonderful for me to see the affirmation of the spirit that's true in the work of the Islamic center and the Bronfman center and everything else.

A Lesson in Community

And I'll just close with a story of my first week here at NYU. As president. I had been named president, it was May 2001, so it was before 9-11, and the students in the Bronfman center were the first to invite me to come visit with them.

And it was a Friday night, and they all gathered for Shabbat dinner on Friday night, and then they go back to the Bronfman center and they ask me to come over after Shabbat dinner. And I left Lisa, we usually tried to have time together at home on Friday night. I left her about 8:30, I think, to go over, and I said, honey, I'll be back in about an hour.

And when I walked in shortly before midnight, my beloved understanding wife looked at me, and I said to her, because I'd come from the law school where we built a little community, everybody knew everybody's name, and I said to her, you know, honey, I think there's a chance. I think that my message of community got through to these students tonight, and I can't, I'm sorry I'm late, I'm sorry we missed our Friday night, but I was on such a roll with them, persuading them of the importance of community.

And she looked at me and she said, honey, where did you go tonight? And I said to the Bronfman center, and I remember she's Jewish, and she said, what night is it? I said, Friday night.

And she said, and where have they been? I said, Shabbat dinner. And she said, and you think you taught them about community?

You see, that's the wonder of an I-thou love affair. Right? Because an I-thou love affair allows you to understand the context in love, the way this person is saying to you, this is the way you look to the world, how absurd of you to think, and how absurd of me to think every time the elevator opens as I go up to the fifth floor and I see the students, the Muslim students gathered for prayer, my heart leaps for joy every time that elevator happens or I see it happening.

Avoiding Pride and Embracing Joy

And that's the wonderful work that's being done here. We have to avoid the pride that I was taught in Brooklyn in the 1950s. If we do, if we embrace the ecumenical mission of our faiths at their best, of this place at its best, of our universities as they fight against simplicity and advance true thought, this miniaturized world can be a world of much great joy and not fear. And don't listen to anybody that tries to scare you about people that are different from you.

Panel Discussion: Defining Sacred and Secular

So let me first begin by thanking both of you for your reflections, for your combination of story and abstraction, if you will, which often sits at the heart of what makes the sacred tick. I don't quite know where to begin in terms of opening up the conversation between you, but the scholar in me wants to ask right here at the beginning, as we've been using this language of the sacred and the secular.

Like, as you were reflecting on your remarks, do those terms actually mean anything anymore? What are they referring to? What is the difference between the secular and the sacred? What's the difference between the sacred and the religious? Or the secular and the state? What are we playing with when we're playing with this big distinction that underlies both of your thoughts?

Are you going to say you would start?

The Meaning of Sacrifice

Well, one of the beautiful words in our language is sacrifice. And one of the religious aspects of baseball is the sacrifice bunt. The word sacrifice, the Latin root is to make sacred.

And so at the root of sacredness is really the idea of sacrificing things for greater things. And whenever you have that, whether it's from a secular person or a religious person, you have something sacred, in my estimation.

I read an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about It's a Wonderful Life, which when I was growing up, that was an American ritual, I think, to watch that around Thanksgiving. And Jimmy Stewart, I was just actually at Princeton where he went, Jimmy Stewart plays a character who keeps sacrificing his dreams for other people's dreams. And he's got a lot of resentment. He's a bit of a passive-aggressive in the film.

But by the end of it, he realizes what an incredible life he's had and what deep meaning was in those sacrifices.

But the article was arguing what a horrible movie it was and how terrible a philosophy that was because why should we give up our dreams for other people's dreams? And I thought that was just such a testimony to the secular.

The Ineffable Dimension

So first of all, I want to join Brother Hamza's opinion. This is what we lawyers do. I'll join, but I'll write a concurring opinion with a slightly... No dissent here. No dissent here at all.

So for me, the dimension of which we're talking and which every human tries to touch, whether it be in love or through spirituality or whatever, is in this ineffable space. And just as it's ineffable, that means that all the architecture of doctrine and organization and so forth serves the wonderful role of carrying on the tradition on the one hand, but has the danger of sapping all of the energy out of the tradition on the other. And when that

sapping occurs by people who want only to maintain their power, that's when religion can become very dangerous.

So for me, the word sacred and profane or sacred and secular are completely circular words if you try to make an explanation of them. In other words, there is no explanation beyond the experience of the person who is experiencing the hierophany of the sacred, the sacred shining through. And so I can't convince you of my sacred or vice versa any more than I can convince you of the existence of God or I could convince Lisa by a syllogism that we were in love.

I mean, these things are not touchable by the first two of the three categories I spent.

The Example of Uluru

So just very quickly, and then I'll toss it back to you. So one example I use for my students is, you know, suppose I were, as could have been, a Catholic priest and the heart of the liturgy of my religion is the Eucharist where the bread and wine are transformed sacramentally into the spirit and body of the Savior.

That's my belief. Now I'm walking through the outback in Australia with a native Australian guide and the great vast flatness of the outback suddenly arises Uluru, U-L-U-R-U. Google it. You'll recognize it. This tremendous orange mound that to the native Australian that's with me and his 100,000 year old culture of welcoming and love represents the connection of this world to the next.

And we stop because he's in awe in the religious sense of it and I'm in awe of it as a beautiful, beautiful piece of nature that has caused me to travel around the world to see it. And I'm so moved I take out the bread and wine that I have with me and I consecrate them liturgically. For me the deepest spiritual act, I'm looking at a wonder of nature not Axis Mundi. He's seeing me eat my lunch.

Right? I mean this is what's sacred and what's profane. What's sacred and what's secular. It depends upon the experience and how it calls you. But we know there is this category that calls us. Okay? And each of us or many of us at least in this room are called deeply to that plane of existence which is the most fulfilling and joyful of all planes. It's the plane of love.

Spiritual but Not Religious

And I think one of the most interesting phenomenons that's happening right now in the U.S. not outside of the U.S. but in the U.S. is precisely the rise of this category sort of like the sacred what's called the realm of the spiritual. And it's the rise of a whole generation of people who are spiritual but not religious. Who claim exactly to feel that common human yearning for the ineffable and that thing that we reach for which is beyond.

And yet it's not connected to any kind of religious practice or deep religious tradition. And it is in many ways calling into question what we mean by secular or sacred anymore. And my question is what is the future of the

category the reality of this thing called religion which is about not the ineffable but about oftentimes practices and doctrines and borders and boundaries and determining mechanisms related to identity.

And not about sacrifice and the giving away of oneself. I mean that's almost the opposite of the dogmatic. And religion is not about the reaching. It's often about the defining that stops the reach. So if you could both just reflect on that. The future of religion.

The Discipline of Practice

Well one of the things I mean obviously what's called organized religion has put off a lot of people. I always tell them to become a Muslim we're the most disorganized religion on the planet. But there is a real disdain now for organized religion.

For me personally one of the things that I love about the pre-modern world is the discipline of the pre-modern world. If you wanted to dance you had to learn how to dance. I grew up, my mother was half Greek so we had to learn how to Greek dance.

And one of the things about the Greek dancers is somebody who really masters the steps and becomes a great Greek dancer is allowed to improvise. And a great musician who has to go through all these scales and learning all these circle of fifths and all this music theory but at a certain point they become free to play the piano. And this is essentially what the liberal arts is about. It's about the discipline of becoming free.

One of the things most people think that they think freely but there are many shackles of the mind and we have natural prejudices that we're often very unaware of like generalization. People come to New York they have a bad experience with a taxi driver and they're convinced that all New York taxi drivers are cheats.

That's a very common hasty generalization. And this is why traditionally learning how to think clearly and to think effectively it was a discipline that actually took a great deal of time.

The Purpose of Religious Practice

And so I think that religious practice one of the things that I found because we have a very specific practice of praying five times a day and Muslims always tell me you know I pray and I'm not really feeling anything.

And for me I think we tend to forget that this is a spiritual experience. Consciousness itself is a spiritual experience. And what practice is meant to do if it's done right is to actually free you to have that experience.

And this is why they say to live in wonder. The child who is still in that world of the sacred you know little children they're already there. They don't need to be anywhere else. But as they come into adulthood and they come into their bodies and have their I mean you can't even use this word anymore but they're sinful experiences. And they become tainted with the world. Religion is there to remove that taint and to reestablish that purity of children.

Confucius on the Spiritual Path

And somebody one of my favorite quotes of Confucius is when I was 15 my heart was set on learning. When I was 30 I remained firm. When I was 40 I no longer had doubts. When I was 50 I knew the mandate of heaven. When I was 60 my ear was obedient. And when I was 70 I could fulfill my heart's desires without deviating.

That's a spiritual path. And that's practice. And that's the purpose of practice. So you can be spiritual without a practice but where is it going to take you?

The Importance of Doctrine

So I would say picking up exactly on what you said Hamza that the future of religion depends in large part on how we use it. And how those to whom we've given it as stewards in my church the hierarchy uses it. I'll take the spirituality as a good start. Even if it's not inside organized religion. If you find it at a baseball game because of the intense attention to detail a baseball game requires, fine. That's why I say baseball is a road to God because it cultivates the intense hard work of noticing and paying attention.

If you find it in the Grand Canyon in the wonder of nature or in Uluru that's a good start. But Hamza is completely right that there are truths. To affirm the importance of the ineffable is not to deny the importance of what we can know and what is knowable and we should come to know.

This is not an argument against science. It's an argument against scientism that we're making. It's making science into a religion and saying it has all knowledge. That's the argument I think both of us are making.

So yes we should try in the great liturgical stories of the great faiths to return to them because they have an ability to convey the ineffable. And doctrine is important because it shines a light.

When Doctrine Goes Wrong

But if doctrine becomes an instrument of power if I'm told by my church the church of life I the father of an in vitro child and the grandfather of three in vitro grandchildren am told that that is a sin then doctrine's gone.

There's something wrong if the church of life is telling me that my daughter and three granddaughters and they're being brought into the world through in vitro was sinful. Now there's something.

So that's a misuse. And depending on now in my church Francis gives me hope. After a bad 30 or 40 years since John the 23rd Francis gives me hope and makes me believe maybe the spirit is so indomitable that even those that we've charged with the stewardship of the great organized institutional faiths will be overcome ultimately by the goodness that's in people.

Love and Suffering

I realize these questions I'm asking aren't leaning directly back to the role of the sacred and the secular and the liberal arts. And John you mentioned this at the very end of your previous comment and you mentioned it at the

end of your talk but historically the space of the sacred has also been the space where we reflect deeply in practice on what it means to love. Love. Very difficult topic. But also the reality of profound human suffering and how we keep going in the face of it.

And particularly in this day and age the events of last week the events of the year before and the century before these questions of how do we learn to love and how do we engage and stop and respond to the profound reality of human suffering. How do those relate to the sacred?

The Reality of Suffering

Well I think the Abrahamic faith in the pre-modern world certainly suffering was never questioned. I mean obviously the story of Job which is a very important story in the Bible. Job is a good man and God's making him suffer and his friends say he must have done something wrong. He's being punished for something he did wrong. But he's a good man. And that story is also mentioned in the Quran.

Suffering is certainly part of the world and we will all suffer just by being human. In fact this is the first truth of the Buddha. Tanha, the nature of the world is the nature of suffering because the world this world is not conclusion to put it in Emily Dickinson's words.

The idea somehow that the temporal in the presence of the infinite could really exact from us I think any crisis of faith for somebody who has deep and profound faith for me personally I don't know. I know that I've seen great suffering. I've experienced. We've all had levels of suffering but I've seen great suffering with incredible fortitude and faith and it's always just overwhelming to see that. It's incredibly inspiring but we know that there today so many people are perplexed by the amount of suffering on the world and by what some have referred to as the silence of God the absence of God.

Where Are We?

Very often people ask where is God? From our tradition the question is not where is God? Where are we?

To alleviate that suffering one of the benefits of tribulation and suffering and I actually translated a work called the 17 Benefits of Tribulation and one of them was that the suffering of others enables you to be a vehicle of alleviating that suffering and certainly our religious traditions have a profound understanding of suffering that in fact Said Nursi, one of the great Turkish saints and scholars said that sometimes God will give you tribulations just to make you uncomfortable in the world because he wants to give you a continual reminder that this is not an abode of comfort for you it's the yearning for the next world and I think all religious traditions grapple with this issue but I think profound faith is what enables people to withstand great suffering and I've seen this.

I think people say that religion is the opiate of the masses but it was there to numb the pain of the world it was the heart of a heartless world and now I think we've replaced real opium with religion so we have a crisis of opioids in America because now people numb that suffering I mean with drugs and wanting to just get out of the

world ecstasis to experience some out of state experience from that but as somebody who knows chronic pain I always try to remind myself that it could be much worse.

A Personal Testament to Suffering and Love

So I'm tempted to say nothing because that was so beautiful if I add anything and I think I will it's dangerous because I'm going to go to a very personal illustration of what Hamza was just talking about so if you've not read and I have to warn you it's very catholic but in the spirit of many and ecumenism I would welcome you to read it if you've not read C.S. Lewis' book A Grief Observed which is his wrestling through the silence of God and whether he can continue to believe in God after the death of his wife whom he married knowing she was dying there's a Tony award winning movie called Shadowlands which was made about their love for each other and I will just give personal testimony to affirm what Hamza said.

I mean the deepest existential suffering that I've had was to find my wife who was younger than me and who was not ill ten years younger than me and who was not ill suddenly dead a half an hour after I'd been speaking to her but but what that transformed was my understanding of our love into something that was greater and I've lived every day of the last ten years trying to be worthy of representing her in this world and in the belief unprovable that our love continues to exist and that she is conscious of my continuing love as we will be together and that could not have come to me and I couldn't have known the fullness of my love for her because in that moment when I found her in that sudden moment every part of my being cried out to substitute for her and although I would have said those words I knew in that moment that that was true and that was a spiritual ecstasy that I've lived with now for the rest of my life so I'm sorry if that makes people uncomfortable that I went to that place but it's a perfect illustration I think Hamza of what you said.

A Mother's Faith in Suffering

Can I add something to that I just lost both of my parents in the last few months and my mother who lived with me the last four years of her life was suffering from cancer and my mother had taken her vows of the Bodhisattva about twenty years ago and she was practicing actively what are called the six perfections and despite the fact that we knew she was in great pain she always had a smile on her face and she never complained and I actually put up online on my website a letter that her doctor her oncologist had written and he said in his two decades of practicing cancer he'd never met a cancer patient that confronted cancer the way she did because he said her symptoms were joy, happiness and smiling and he said he realized that he was the patient and she was his doctor and I think that certainly I know it was her faith and it was a conscious thing that she was practicing.

Social Justice and the Sacred

This past week at Union Theological Seminary we welcomed a leading legal scholar in the United States Michelle Alexander who wrote The New Jim Crow on mass incarceration and what she says is the great moral

Standing Against Injustice

Well I think one of the facts of life on earth is that there's a great deal of injustice there always has been I think there's a great utopian fantasy about creating a world without justice part of the reason why sin is in the world is that we're meant to stand up oppose it within ourselves and attempt to help others remove it from themselves I think one of the things about Dr. King and my family is heavily involved in that movement my sister actually marched across the bridge in Selma I marched as a 7 year old with my mother on Selma with the theological union in Marin County so one of the things that was very clear and I've heard this from people that were actively involved in that movement is in fact somebody who struggled with my mother in the civil rights said at her funeral that we were motivated by a sense of hope a sense of righteousness and indignation about these things but she said there wasn't the kind of anger that you're seeing today in a lot of people and I think that's because of the absence of the sacred.

Helping the Oppressor and the Oppressed

I think that one of our prophetic traditions from the Prophet Muhammad is he said help your brother the oppressor and the oppressed and they asked him how do we help our brother the oppressor in other words because they knew his teaching so what do we oppress with him and he said by stopping him from his oppression and Albert Memmi wrote a very important book called The Colonizer and The Colonized which is he was a Jewish Tunisian who was looking at the colonization of Tunisia and as an outsider as a Jewish outsider within the Tunisian community he could see this horrible cycle and the wonderful poet Blake talks about the purple tyrants the hand of vengeance found the purple tyrants bed and smashes the purple tyrants head and then becomes a tyrant in his stead that this is the cycle of justice the desire for justice by becoming unjust something Nietzsche warned us in fighting the monster don't become a monster and this is very often what happens in these movements.

Social Mercy, Not Just Social Justice

I mean one of the tragedies now of seeing a lot of reverse racism and I'm seeing a lot of this now just in a lot of the just from the Black Lives Movement which has emerged which is addressing a very important issue but when it's very tragic for me to see a society that there is I don't think there's any society and I've been all over this world I don't think there's any society that is actively trying to overcome the historical wrongs of the past like this society and I really believe that the anti-discrimination laws that have been enacted in this country are unprecedented and they're imitated in other places but many places don't have them if you want to see real racism and I've lived in Africa I've lived in the Middle East and I've been to Asia you will find racism that has no redress to those wrongs and I think that the fact that there were so many white people involved in the civil rights movement that were trying to overcome those wrongs and I get and I understand the real problems that a lot of white people have about white privilege and all these things I understand that but we need to help people overcome within themselves not from a place of anger but a place centered and rooted in a spiritual desire for not only helping ourselves but helping others overcome these tribulations and I truly believe that it is the sacred voice that enables this.

I don't think the secular voice has that capacity because I think the secular voice too easily falls into the demands of justice and not recognizing that not only do we need social justice we need social mercy and I really believe we need a social mercy movement.

The Problem of Unrighteous Anger

There's a history of righteous anger well remember anger ethically should be directed to the right object in the right degree with the right amount at the right time and for the right reasons and so when you're just angry which a lot of people are we call it road rage where I come from I mean there's just people that are pissed off and they're walking around angry and they're looking for anybody to explore their anger with and that's a spiritual disease anger is a mortal sin not because it's an activity of an event or two events or three events it's a state of being IRA it is a state of being and when you fall into that state of being whether it's righteous anger because every angry person is going to justify their anger but if you don't see it for what it is our prophet was asked once by a man he said give me some advice and he said لا تغضب don't get angry and he said give me some advice and he said in other words I don't want that advice give me some real advice and the prophet said لا تغضب don't get angry and he said a third time give me some advice he said don't get angry.

Education and Suffering in the World

So I'll just loop back to say that there is so much suffering in the world I mean now I'm back on the faculty at NYU but in my work outside of NYU I'm trying to bring education to the kids in the world that are being neglected I mean really neglected 85 million 85 million primary and secondary age kids in the world today who if we don't change things will never once in their lives meet a teacher okay never once nobody is even pretending to educate them another 260 million that will never get past the 4th grade so 350 million kids that are

just being written off and some of them are in urban slums and some of them in remote areas and we just don't care because they don't have a disease that we might catch okay there's a lot of suffering out there and if we can touch the religious space the sacred space that we've been talking about then we understand that sacrifice for others is is the natural extension of love of self it's really the only way to love yourself and to see real love is to extend it.

Chosen for Obligation, Not Privilege

So so the social justice movement is intrinsically in my view tied up with the spirituality that comes with the elevation of what it means to be human and the universal that that's getting back to not dividing up into you know oh I'm on the winning team but it's very interesting from this stage Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrestled one night in a major lecture with the question what does it mean to be the chosen people and he said much in the same words that Hamza has said here tonight chosen for special obligation not chosen for special privilege and that's what connects all of this for me.

The Current Election and Fear

So we're getting near the end of our time and I can't avoid asking you both a question about this conversation in the context of the election so you knew it was coming no conversation can happen in this country right now that lasts more than five minutes without it turning to this topic what is being revealed to us from your positions as theologians who engage the public square in this election it's the end of time somebody said it's like one of those television series or soap operas where at the end they just start getting so outrageous in their scenarios but I have just a one of the benefits of learning logic one of my close associates and dear friends is a ER doctor down in Florida she's teaching her 13 year old logic she did formal logic and now she's doing material logic so they watched the debates last night and she said she's 13 years old she's saying oh my god mom that's an ad populum oh that's an ad hominem attack and so she was picking up on all the fallacies going on in the debate so that was one of the benefits.

The Use of Fear by Demagogues

We forget that logic was actually taught in all the high schools in the United States even 60 or 70 years ago which helped a lot for people to see these my great grandmother studied Bain's logic in Black Falls, Wisconsin and I actually have her book I know she had a toothache on December 23rd 1882 because she wrote it in her book but there's a chapter on the emotions because that's part of learning rhetoric is dealing with the emotions and probably the most interesting section in Aristotle's book on rhetoric is his section on the emotions and explaining the emotions but one of the things that in Bain's book is that fear is often used by demagogues and a population should always be vigilant when they see a politician or a demagogue using fear to scare people because people will override their rational impulses and move towards irrational responses when the emotion of fear begins to motivate them and so I think the thing that troubles me most about this current environment is the environment of fear and I think there's a lot of unsettled aspects that are happening.

What Happened to Great Speeches?

But the other thing that really troubles me is I just I watched once great speeches with my wife and we watched the inaugural address of Kennedy and you know Kennedy was no saint and I'm not in any way sentimental about that but I just after watching this speech I turned and my wife had tears coming down her eyes and she just looked at me and said what happened? How do we go from that to what we've got now? And I would argue that it's a loss of liberal arts education.

The Crisis of Trust

So this might be the first point of disagreement of the night. I didn't expect that we would go here but I'm very happy to be here. And it only might be and I won't push it except to say the following it could be the end of time but notice the difference. I'm not making a declarative statement. It is the end of time.

I took that as being a bit facetious. It was facetious. It's always the end of time. Yeah. But I'm going to use the Unless you're playing baseball.

I'm going to use the differentiated language for a purpose because I spent a lot of time in the world of logic and I agree with you about it and I'm going to say that this is a very, very tough moment. And if we allow 20 years at least of the building of a coliseum society where 85% of Americans say in polls they don't trust their neighbors. Forget about the institutions. There's just no trust.

We have a trustee named Evan Chesler. Evan Chesler grew up as a tailor's son up in the Grand Concourse. I may have a fact or two wrong because I'm reaching back to when we installed him in this building as a trustee in a ceremony about 2002 and he said that he grew up on the Grand Concourse and he was the only one in his family that went to high school and the only one that read the newspaper and he would come home from high school and he would say to his father at the dinner table, Dad, what about this? What about that?

And Evan's father would always say, Don't worry, Evan. They're taking care of it. And he said, I always wondered who they were. And tonight as I become a trustee of NYU, this is 2002, I realize I'm part of they with the responsibility to take care of it, right? And I said to him last night, I said, you know, Evan, no father is saying that to a son in the United States today. No one believes they're taking care of it.

The Attack on Law and Institutions

But there is a reason for that, ladies and gentlemen. In 1995, I was the head of the Association of American Law Schools and I wrote a pastoral letter to all my constituents, all the law professors and educators in the country, because I had been given a copy of an internal memo by a man named Frank Luntz to candidates for office saying, if you want to win, attack law and lawyers. There is nothing too negative you can say about them.

And I remember writing at that time, this is a nation that was built on law, on De Tocqueville's notion of the Jeffersonian law and if we start attacking law and lawyers, and then there's going to be just this built up and

there is no equivalency between the two participants in that debate last night. And I don't care how you're voting, I'm going to tell you how I'm voting and I'm with her. Okay?

No Equivalency

And the fact of the matter is the fact of the matter is that if that man is the representative of this country to the world and to our children, not only will we all be embarrassed by it, but we will have rewarded a 40 year baseless attack on a strong woman. And we will have put another nail in the coffin of thought.

So yes, do I think that she's a panacea or perfect? No. Do I think that on January 21st the campaign of 2020 will begin and that it will require leadership beyond my capacity and perhaps beyond hers to restore trust in this country and so forth because the pummeling will begin? Of course I believe it's going to start then.

But make no mistake about it, I'm not going to leave this stage with any doubt that I think there was an equivalency or is an equivalency in terms of where this should be. And that's not so much a political endorsement as it is an endorsement of liberal arts education. Period. End of case.

I certainly wasn't making any equivalency. I always look for good grammar as just a hallmark. I've always found that on the internet, invariably all the stupid statements of trolls are poorly written.

Encountering the Other

So last question. John, earlier you brought up Abraham Joshua Heschel. Amazing intellect who 50 years ago last spring wrote a remarkable essay, No Religion is an Island, in which he made the claim, the very radical claim that actually a religious person actually only comes to know themselves truly through their encounter with another religion. And not just an encounter but one in which they are willing to be vulnerable and lessen their own hold upon the claims of their own religion. That that is in fact the most sacred moment when your own hold is loosening as you encounter the other.

So, could we end with each of you giving a description of a moment in your own life when that was in fact manifest. That your own sense of your own tradition was jarred loose by an encounter with another in another religious tradition.

Seeing the Human Beyond the Other

Well, for me personally, I once worked as a cardiac nurse and I had a patient who had just had a heart attack. He was a Sikh. He had his turban on. And he was opening up his heart to me about what was happening to him.

And the turban, the Sikh turban disappeared and that otherness completely dissipated and I just saw another human being in front of me confronting his mortality and reaching out to me for solace. And I think we just, we very often I've never been a person, I went through a period just after being brainwashed for a little while dogmatically probably that was troublesome for me, but I wasn't raised like that so it didn't last very long.

And I think a lot of religious converts to other religions often very, they very often, in fact Mahatma Gandhi said about Marmaduke Pickthall that he was that rare individual that could convert to another religion without becoming a fanatic.

Looking Beyond Religious Labels

And so I think I've never looked at people with religious hats on or religious personas I've looked at, I try to look at them, I mean I look at John Sexton, I see a very distinguished man of character that I respect and I'm not going to let his Catholicism, which I respect deeply because I grew up in the Catholic tradition and am in some ways an armchair Catholic theologian but and the same is true for any other religious faith. And even secular people, I'm not going to allow the secularity to blind me from their goodness.

One of the things that the Quran says is:

"O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm for Allah, witnesses in justice, and do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just. Be just; that is nearer to righteousness. And fear Allah; indeed, Allah is Acquainted with what you do."

It says do not let the hatred of another people prevent you from being just. And so even when people hate you, it should not prevent you from being just with them, let alone merciful and compassionate for those that don't hate you.

And so the word in Arabic, shanaʼan, is a specific type of hatred that blinds you of the goodness of the object of your hate. And that's the worst form of hatred, where you can't even see the goodness in the other.

A Mother Who Saw and Loved Color

And so I think ultimately that's my attempt. And that's the way my mother was in the world. I once said to my brother that she didn't see color. And he said, no, I totally disagree with you. She saw color and she loved it. She relished it.

Encountering Spirituality in the World

So for me, it would be too easy to refer to the fact that everybody in my family, my children, my wife, my grandchildren, are all Jewish. And the Seder is always an experience that takes me out of myself. Every time I go to NYU Abu Dhabi, I'm taken out of myself by the wonder that I see in the evident spirituality of some of the people I encounter there.

I can't give an example as deep as Hamza just did. I wouldn't try to touch the space that he just touched. If I were in a life that tries always to see things through the ecumenical lens that I described earlier, I think perhaps some of my deepest ecstatic experiences, where I've looked back on my own experience and said, boy, I've been taken out by another's religion, have occurred in very remote areas of the world where I encounter extraordinary spirituality in villages or huts in Laos and Cambodia.

And you just, there's this sense of the ancestors and the spirits that we don't associate with modern dogmatic religion. It's almost pre-temporal, or pre-historical at least, but I've been in the presence of people who manifest such a deep spirituality and a blessedness and a goodness and a happiness that comes out in both Laos and Cambodia and then undergone the horror of listening to their stories about how they would blind themselves in one eye to prevent going into the military service during the war, the American war as they call it.

Dialogic Dialogue

And I think every time, I'll just come back, this is maybe being too intellectual, but every time that we enter into what I called earlier dialogic dialogue, not just a dialogue, but where you're listening to each other and exchanging views and so forth, but where you really try to put yourself in the place of the other being and understand where he or she is and then face back.

That's been a habit of life that was inculcated in me by a great man who used to teach here at NYU. He was my mentor at Fordham, named Ewert Cousins, who when I met him in 1963 was the world's leading expert on a single medieval theologian of the Christian faith. And by 1983, when I was beginning my career here at NYU, there was a conference at the United Nations that I attended to celebrate the publication of his 60 volume work on world spirituality, which had 25 faith traditions in their spiritual, ineffable strain, because all the organized religions have that spiritual, ineffable strain.

That's the greatest migration I ever saw and I've just tried to expose myself as much as I can to it.

Closing Remarks

Well, I ask all of you to join me in thanking these two theologians, these two defenders and inspirers of the liberal arts tradition, and two very deep public intellectuals, and I feel privileged to have been here tonight. I want to thank the people who organized this at NYU and all the good work that's going on here, and walk away from this with lots to think about and lots to do. Thank you all. Thank you.