Midcoast Senior College
A word from the faculty--Yeagar Hudson
Born in rural Mississippi, Yeager Hudson felt called to the Christian ministry. After completing a degree in theology, he turned his path toward college teaching. And so, with an additional degree in hand, Colby College invited him into its department of philosophy. As a Fulbright scholar, research in India and Sri Lanka gave rise to his Emerson and Tagore: The Poet as Philosopher. Retiring from Colby after forty years, Yeager and his wife, Louise, settled in Georgetown where they had long been summering.
“I am fascinated by the power of reason,” he writes. “I am also distressed at the tendency of individuals and nations to ignore reason and act on emotion and prejudice.”
For us he has taught Philosophy of Religion (using his own text book) and Great World Religions.
from Yeager Hudson:
Finding out about Senior College was a wonderful discovery for me. I have been retired from teaching long enough to realize how much I miss it. I have taught two courses at Senior College and have found it enormously rewarding. I am now enjoying taking a Senior College course. How very rewarding are the associations and the friendships I have formed through this great program of life-time learning! Louise and I attended the Meeting of the Minds conference at Bar Harbor in October where we had the delightful experience of meeting Senior College participants from all over the state. I hope you all realize that we have got something very important and very exciting going here! Rabbi Sky, the moving power behind forming the Senior College network, was at the conference with his usual razor sharp insight and his highly contagious optimism and enthusiasm.
In the spring I will teach a course on ethics. We will talk about the basis for moral beliefs, the question of individual and cultural relativism, the relation of the “right” to the “good,” the question whether there is any essential connection between religion and ethics, and then we will examine the moral teachings of several great ethicists such as Aristotle, the Utilitarians, Kant, the social contract theorists, and the feminists. The text we will be using offers case studies to which we can apply the theories we are examining. I anticipate some really stimulating discussion! YH