Today's younger generation wants to change the world.
I think there's a lot of impatience with institutions that sometimes make it hard to do the kinds of world-changing things that this this generation wants to do. And to me, that's that really joyful part about what Harvard Divinity School is doing—It's an institution that's aiding students in their vocational call to change the world in a multitude of ways. And I think that's the real breakthrough here.
In at least the Foreign Service, which is sort of the professional core of workers in the United States Department of State, there's a woeful lack of religious literacy, and particularly in the office that I ran it was a real struggle to find people who had the kind of expertise I needed to help diplomats get a deeper understanding of religion in context around the world.
So here's one of the few programs around the country, frankly, that was training students and had a grasp religious literacy that deeper, more sophisticated way in a way that might help their own professional careers, they envisioned it unfolding. And I thought, finally, higher education is beginning to understand the need, particularly in diplomacy for a more sophisticated approach to religion.