Bill Moyers: Pastor, Politician, Journalist

In a world in which higher education is increasingly thought as preparation for a profession, being multidisciplinary in college and especially in graduate school is decreasingly sought and valued by students at universities in the United States. Unlike in the E.U., where it is more common for the professional schools to be separate from universities given the difference between training and education—skills and knowledge—American universities make it institutionally possible for a person to get a MBA and MPA after a BA in liberal arts or a BS in natural science, or, less commonly, to get a MBA degree and a MDiv degree after having studied in the liberal arts and sciences. The MBA and LLB or JD has been a more popular combination, and I spoke once with a MPA student at Harvard who already had a MBA from Notre Dame and was considering a degree in law. I think the benefits vocationally from being multidisciplinary in one’s formal higher education (i.e., college and graduate school) tend to kick in only after a few decades after one’s final graduation. Perhaps only in retrospect does the traces of such an education reveal themselves in a person’s work-life. I contend that the political aide, pastor, and journalist, Bill Moyers, is an excellent example of how a multidisciplinary education can enrich a person’s career, which is not likely to stay “inside the lines” of one particular industry. This is not a bad thing.

The full essay is at "Bill Moyers."

Is the Hindu Bhagavadgita Monotheist?

Even though the Bhagavadgita is just a small part of the Mahabharata Hindu epic, the popularity of the former book in Hindu households has led to it being referred to as the Hindu Bible. This likeness should be taken at face value, for the contents in the Gita are very different than the theological context of the Bible, whether just the Torah, the Talmud, or the New Testament. Even though the virtue of kindness or love issuing out in compassion to other people is a shared descriptor of the Hindu Lord Krishna, which is the highest god in the Gita, and the Christian Lord Jesus, the ideational dissimilarities between the Gita and the Bible should not be glossed over. Put another way, not even the symbol of the mandala, which Joseph Campbell includes as the religious archetype of wholeness in The Power of Myth, should dispel the notion that religions contain unique and thus different philosophical and theological ideas and even just stances.

The full essay is at "Is the Hindu Bhagavadgita Monotheist?"