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Carole Mikita reporting A Harvard professor and a church president met today to talk "Shakespeare."
Carole Mikita has the story of the meeting and what it means for the University of Utah.
Two men who relish a chance to discuss British literature... Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard, considered the country's foremost Shakespearean scholar... and President Gordon B. Hinckely. His alma mater has an Endowment for British Studies in his name, which is sponsoring the professor's visit.
Pres. Gordon B. Hinckley, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: "We need technology, we need the professions, we need all of those things, but we need the heart also, and the humanities speak of the heart and men's aspirations for the good and the beautiful."
Stephen Greenblatt has written many scholarly studies. His latest book is a bestseller.
He says it aims to discover the actual person who wrote the most important body of imaginative literature of the last thousand years.
Stephen Greenblatt, Ph.D./ Hinckley Endowment visiting scholar: "This Hinckley Endowment is a visionary plan. It's about discovering those things that are simultaneously deeply related to you and also alien from you. I think this is a wonderful way into that whole project of an education."
Hans Bremer/ British Studies, University of Utah: "To have him here on this campus is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
And for Greenblatt, a chance to visit with Gordon B. Hinckley, a man who believes as Shakespeare wrote, "that which should accompany old age... honor, love, obedience, troops of friends'...he has.
Professor Greenblatt spoke at the University of Utah tonight as part of the Hinckley Endowment for British Studies.
