 Decades ago, I found myself citing Professor Berman a great deal. Here at the University of Chicago, we got to invite a guest once for a prestigious seminar, and we chose John Whitty, because we liked exactly what he was doing. I had been there for a couple of addresses, and that's before there was a center, but you could see that the energy was building up, that this was a place where this could happen. It had the encouragement of faculty and background. So when it was announced, I think, we historians like things neat, and I think it came with the new century, 2000. And so when that came, I guess I was ready to go. I've had a lifelong interest in children and the child. And one day, John Whitty and Don Browning sat me down and said, we have a new project, and we'd like you to take part in it. And if you took part in it, what your accent would be. And I instantly blurted out, because I always cared about it, I'd like to work on the mystery of the child. Children are a big part of my own personal life. We had four sons. We had two foster children when we adopted. I have a stepdaughter and three great grandchildren, nine grandchildren. This is a big part of our life. This year, we had seven boys, age nine to 14, at the table for a whole year. And it's just buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. And we worked out a lot of covenants, how we would interact with it. And it always impressed me how much imagination they bring and how hard we worked to kill it off, how much wonder is a part of their life and how we try to push them into a certain groove. This is a book against super control. It's against the notion that because we're older and bigger, we're able to determine everything about their life. And they fight back with their only instrument, which is to have a tantrum. And you can never negotiate during a tantrum. We always tell our kids, you know, get over it. When you're over your snit, come back in and we'll have fun, which we would do. Most of these childcare manuals assume that you have to have control, whether the teacher or the parent. I don't mean malicious control, I don't mean the whip, but I mean that you have to have it figured out. The more you think about children, the more you find that they won't ever have it thought out so that this, the concept of mystery, which runs through the book, goes back to a French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, who says, problems have solutions. You may not always reach them. You could move the biggest building in Chicago, the Sears Tower, if you had enough money. The problem is getting enough money and big enough cranes, but you could do it. I can't control the imagination of a child without killing off what's wonderful about a child. I have to say it could not have happened had I not been in that project. I could not have written it by punching Google or going to the library or having a research assistant or just reading, reading, reading. It's really born of that weekly dialogue, I think 19 of them. When you walk into an interdisciplinary situation, you are either at a place where no one has any concept of it and they stumble around or at a place where there's been an encouragement of it, where the leaders know. John Whitty and the team and so on have done that on other projects so they're ready to go and they know how to play that interplay of specialty and general. Therefore, we had a lot going for us. As far as I'm concerned, I have a double vision of interdisciplinarity. First of all, it's interdisciplinarity. That is, it has to be disciplined. It's not mush. It's not everybody skimming the surface. So it's very important that everybody in the room was really good at something. Students are fortunate when there's something interdisciplinary going on if they respect the disciplines because that's when scholars make themselves vulnerable to each other. What's a project on the child and the temptation is to assume that everybody is about a child is somebody in mid-career of education or psychology or counseling or something like that. And I think to have somebody around who's not known for this but who picks up what you do by studying history for a long time was probably an asset. Because if you're a historian, you are surprised when anything good happens. You are not put down when things go bad because you've seen it. First of all, everybody right about dies and have utopianism or mere optimism. You're born a realist and you've seen terrible things happen. Thirty years war. Third of Europe is killed. Black death, half of Europe dies. And the next generation, they have new children, they're coming up and these kids dance and they have poetry and so on. And I think the historian brings a little of that sense. You're not going to be done in. And I would often raise it that way with the group. Again, because they had to work on a problem, it's pretty easy to go down. And I would often say, you could do all that, but you also have to account for where do all the good kids come from. Because there are a lot of good kids. The programs I was at in the large auditorium in the law school, they're not just law students and divinity students, it's the town if they could get in when President Carter's there just jammed. And this wouldn't happen if there weren't a center. And now the larger world, I have tremendous interest in at the October 24th, the 26th event, wrapping up these years. I'm going to talk about the future of law as religion, the future of religion as law. These are two zones of life that are tentacular and interweb. They're just locked together. You don't make a move in America in religion without being aware that separation of church and state means this or doesn't mean that. A church or a synagogue can't change the parking lot without going to the zoning board. You better be watching the laws about child abuse, sexual abuse. You better be sure that what's tax exempt is rightly tax exempt. Meanwhile, the legal profession around the world is finding, think of all the things you can't do in the Islamic world because of the law. Well, Emery has somebody there who knows that, and that helps. There are plenty of places in the U.S. where there are good individual scholars of this field, though this center always draws on it and brings them in. But there's no place where that convergence and concentration of energies, and that's what's always excited me about it. While the Emery Law School has always done a good deal on the international, wonderful two volumes on human rights, for example, it's unmatched. So you can't say you have the center to do that, but with the center there now, we just can't think about any of these questions without immediately doing things globally. I think all 19 of ours were domestic. They were chosen on those grounds. You can't do everything at once. But when we have President Carter there in these public programs, he quickly reminds us. And he and Dr. Faggy, who was another one of our guests, marshal a team to get rid of riverbindness or working on Guinea worm. Horrible stuff. Even those parabolic references let us know there's another world out there. Now, we can address individual problems, HIV, AIDS, and so on. But I think to have a sustained, interrelated thing, I'd like to see it do more on going global. It has access to it. We have the talent. We have people from other nations. If immigration allows them in or allows them to stay where they are here or helps them carry it back, which is more important to the places they came from, I would think that would be one of the major emphasis I'd work on in the future. What I really had fun with was chatting with them all after the day that President Carter was on the first time. And he was telling the story. All of a sudden he turned to this room of students and 200 divinity students and everybody else. And he said, Now, if I know Marty, this project is going to end with 19 books. Who of you are going to change the world? And then he pulled out of his pocket. He said, this afternoon we need 20 people in Genesis Project. We need so many people. He had a whole list of projects with prostitutes, with homeless, with all these things. We need to go, by the way, a month later when we had another public program, I never did that in my life, but a former president asked us to, so I did. And now I'm hooked. That's how he recruits. But when we went back to the snacks at half-time and after, and whenever we talk about it, that question really burned in people's mind. This project ended 19 books. How are you going to change the world? Now, if Frank Alexander goes back to Flint, Michigan, where he studies the laws for the homeless, and draws together 10 or 20 people, which he's likely to do, they're going to change the world.