So just trying to help you out. All righty. Kirk and, Kirk and Pugh, here it happens right now in your piece.

All right. So we are going to dive into this discussion about your book, the end times theology after you've been left behind. This of course is part of the Homebrew Christianity guides to, uh, everything, I guess, um, this is the guide to the end times. Uh, it is a series that's meant to fit in your back pocket and read when you're on the subway. It's got funny things in it, and I want to find out soon how many of those you wrote and how many of them Tripp wrote, and we're going to work that out. But before we get into the book itself, you have a personal history with Christian tales of the end these apocalyptic eschatological movements in North America. And I'd love to hear you say a little bit about that. Tell that story to give folks a little bit of a sense of where you're coming from as you tackle this issue.

Well, let me start with the sort of war story of how I came to be in the series. Tripp and Tony Jones at an AAR-SBL meeting accosted me at the Fortress Press reception. What they do

is they stand back and they count your drinks and after they think you're ready then they come up to you with a pen and paper and a hand. I

think that's what happens. And so they're like, dude, can you talk to us for a minute? And they say, would you be willing to contribute a volume to the series? And I said, sure, I'd be happy to. Because we'll say anything in some states. And so I started saying, so what's available? And they said, Jesus available. And they said, Tripp has that one. I was like, yeah, okay. And then they started going down the list, you know, church, you know, Holy Spirit. And then they said, in times. And I said, that's the one I want, because that's the one I had had experience with. So basically, as you alluded to, I started out the book by talking about the fact that when I was a sophomore in college, I had a conversionary moment, probably at the time I would have referred to as born again. And this was way, way back in the day when there were Jesus freaks and not the group or not the DC talk thing. And so this was back in the early 1970s and I didn't know what to do with this newfound faith. And so a couple of weeks after I had had this moment, I read a story in the New York Times about a group called the Children of God. Well, it turns out that they had one of those communes 10 miles from my college. So a bunch of us got in a car and we drove up to them and New

York Times leading people astray. I

mean, you know, well, now I'm going to say that later on the New York Times also had a story about something called the Love-In Community, L-O up in upstate New York outside of Ithaca, which was one of the first Jesus communes. And that group helped pull me back together after this other experience. So, you know, New York Times is, you know, good and bad. But anyway, so we went up there and, you know, you're 19 years old, you don't know anything, you have no idea what's going on. And these people know everything. They have an answer to every question, they know the Bible backwards and forwards. And, you know, I was raised Methodist, I didn't know anything about the Bible. So we ended up, a bunch of my friends ended up actually joining them and dropping out of college. It was spring semester of 1972 and I wasn't quite ready to make that move. So I went off to the Love End community instead and spent three weeks with them. I guess this community was famous, most famous for where Phil K went to record Love Broke Through and his first Christian albums after Glass Arp. And so they sort of gave me a sense that there were other options out there. But I left them and came back to Virginia and joined the children of God and ended up with them for four months. This is an apocalyptic group. I want to say cult, but cult is a very pejorative term. They were dissenting or a new religious movement and they were definitely out of their minds, which after four months I sort of just looked around one day and I said, these people are batshit crazy. And I just have to get out. And that's a story in itself that I don't think we need to go into. But eventually, I was able to find my way out of that community. But the kind of indoctrination or the ideas that they instilled within me kind of stuck around for a while and My earliest communities were in a costal now. Let me back up say that Right after this conversionary moment. Somebody put a copy of the late great planet earth in my hand, uh, Val Lindsay and Once again, you're 19. You don't know anything. This is the first time you've been exposed to this stuff and you're reading this and it's like, holy crap, I have the secret to the end of the world. How come nobody knows this? You know, and you're sort of, it's a heady experience, you know, to know things that nobody else knows and you get a little prideful and your hubris starts to kick in, and you're going around grabbing people and talking about the fourth blood moon. And, you know, so— You see, what's

happening right now is, like, as a New Testament professor and Jeffrey's new dump theology, that prideful need to tell everybody what's, you know, how to read the Bible rightly, it never goes away. It just gets redirected into more socially acceptable forms. Yeah,

it's true. So anyway, so that was my first exposure to this. And for, you know, a good long time, I had, I had no other options.