My guest on the show today is Rod Dreher, conservative Christian writer and author of many books, most recently Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, which came out in October from Zondervan press.
This is the audio complement to a written interview I did with Dreher that’s just out in Arc, the magazine formerly known as Religion and Politics. It was recently re-branded and re-imagined under the auspices of its new editor in chief, my brother Mark Oppenheimer. I’ll link to the interview in the show notes. You should read it, and check out the magazine, which is publishing a lot of really interesting stuff.
To give you some context for this conversation, which launches right into a recent experience that Dreher had of having a kind of low key exorcism, his new book is mostly about the experiences that he and others have had of what I would call the supernatural, but he would call the divine or the demonic.
So hauntings, possessions, exorcisms, divine epiphanies, psychedelic experiences of alternate realities, even alien abductions and visitations. For Rod, this is all evidence of the fact that world is far stranger and more wondrous than materialists like me can perceive.
I don’t agree with him on most or all of this, or on most of his conservative politics, but I spend almost no time in this conversation arguing with him on either front. That’s because I’m not that interested in arguing with him. I’m interested in understanding him and his perspective, which is one that I’ve long found compelling even as I’ve also found it alarmist and wrong-headed.
I keep reading Rod, book after book, year after year, precisely because he sees the world so differently than me, and because I never doubt his desire to live thoughtfully and authentically in the world, and I never doubt that he’s in touch with interesting cultural vibrations, even if they may not be the ones he thinks they are.
A few final notes before I launch into the conversation, which starts rather abruptly because I forgot to hit record when we first started talking.
One is I have some exciting episodes coming up, which you should be on the lookout for. One is with the aforementioned Mark Oppenheimer. We’re going to talk about his recent piece in Arc on Paul Coates, Ta Nehisi Coates’s father, who was recently given a lifetime achievement award by the National Book Foundation for his work as founder and editor of Black Classic Press. Mark writes about the uncomfortable reality of how many of the books and authors who Coates has championed have bizarre and often quite nasty views about race, sexuality, and Jews.
I also have an upcoming episode with Geoff Schullenberger, managing editor of Compact Magazine, about the post-left. I’m still not quite sure what the post-left is, even after the conversation, but I really enjoyed talking to Geoff about it.
So stay tuned for those episodes, and whatever comes next. I have an invitation out to Lorne Michaels, creator and master of Saturday Night Live, but I haven’t heard anything back yet, so we’ll see. My hopes are not high.
What else? Oh, yeah, Rod is currently living in Hungary. This comes up in our conversation.
Finally, I start with Rod’s recent exorcism, in the conversation, in part because it’s an example of what the book is about, though it happened after the book was written, but also because his discussion of what needed to be exorcised goes directly to his personal history of family trauma and dysfunction. In our written interview, and in this conversation, he talks openly and with great vulnerability about his painful relationship with his late father and about how, in his view, the pain opened up traumatic cracks in his psyche that dark spirits were able to sneak in through.
Enjoy the show. Read the interview.
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