Bill Moyers Opens Beall-Russell Humanities Festival at Baylor

Emmy-winning broadcast journalist Bill Moyers will open Baylor University's Beall-Russell Humanities Festival, which will be held Sept. 29, Oct. 1 and 5.
Moyers, known for such in-depth reports as God and Politics and Close to Home: Moyers on Addiction, will open the three-day festival Sept. 29 at 4 p.m. with a lecture on "Genesis and the Millennium" in Waco Hall.
Other guest lecturers in this year's festival are The Very Rev. Michael Mayne, dean emeritus of Westminster Abbey, and Edward W. Said, Columbia University scholar, critic and noted author.
Mayne will discuss "The Idea of a University" at 4 p.m. Oct. 1 in the Jones Theater in the Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center. The festival will conclude at 4 p.m. Oct. 5 with Said's presentation on "Invention, Memory and Place" in the Jones Theater. The lectures, which are free and open to the public, will be held on the Baylor campus.
The guest lecturers participating in the festival have enjoyed long, highly acclaimed careers. Born in Oklahoma and reared in Texas, Moyers forged his career in print and television journalism through years of public service. He served as deputy director of the Peace Corps under President John F. Kennedy and was special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. He has received 30 Emmy awards from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities' Charles Frankel Prize and recognition from the Academy of Arts and Sciences for his television series, Creativity and A Walk Through the 20th Century. The multicultural and ideological diversity of his breadth are reflected in productions such as God and Politics, A World of Ideas I and II, Healing of the Mind, Facing Hate with Elie Weisel, and Close to Home: Moyers on Addiction. In addition, he has received more than 60 distinguished national and international awards. Moyers and his wife, Judith Davidson, collaborate on their production company, Public Affairs Television Inc.
Mayne has enjoyed a distinguished career in the Church of England. He is an Anglican priest who served in London and Hertfordshire in the early years of his career and became head of religious programs for the British Broadcasting Corp. Radio in 1972. In 1979, he became Vicar of Great St. Mary's, the university church at Cambridge, where he remained until 1986. At that time, Mayne was invited by Queen Elizabeth II to become dean of Westminster, an appointment that conferred upon him control of the Royal Peculiar, Westminster Abbey. Upon his retirement from that position in 1996, he was appointed dean emeritus of Westminster and that same year became a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, an honor conferred by the Queen. Mayne has written three books: A Year Lost and Found, a personal meditation on his struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; This Sunrise of Wonder: Letters for the Journey, a reflection on the mystery and wonder of creation and the nature of the ordinary; and Pray, Love, Remember , an apologia for Westminster Abbey and its ministries. Mayne lectured at Baylor in 1991 and 1993 and has given more than 1,000 Baylor students and faculty private tours of the interior of Westminster Abbey during his tenure there as dean through the Baylor in Britain summer abroad programs.
Said is a university professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is a literary scholar and critic in the areas of multicultural and post-colonial literature, a music critic and an internationally recognized writer on cultural and political issues. Born in Jerusalem, he and his family were exiled from their homeland in 1947. He received his bachelor's from Princeton and his doctorate from Harvard. A professor at Columbia since 1963, Said is the author of 16 books that have been translated into 26 languages. He writes a twice-monthly column for Al-Hayat and Al Ahram, and is a regular contributor to newspapers in France, Italy, Sweden, Britain, Spain, the Arab countries, Pakistan, India and Japan. He is vice president of the Modern Language Association and will assume its presidency in 1999. He has been awarded numerous prizes and honors and has been visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins and Toronto. Recently Said joined Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a new production of Beethoven's Fidelio for which he wrote a new English text replacing all the spoken dialogue.
Mrs. Virginia Beall Ball established the Beall-Russell Lectures in the Humanities in 1982 to honor her mother, DeLouise McClelland Beall, and Lily Russell, former dean of women at Baylor University. Mrs. Beall and Mrs. Russell were both members of Baylor's class of 1910.
For more information, contact Baylor at (254) 710-2618 or visit the 1998 Beall-Russell Humanities Festival web site at www.baylor.edu/~Beall-Russell/ .