The Eric Metaxas Show - We Need Free Speech the Way the Body Needs Oxygen to Survive (Continued)

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Is there an innate human knowledge of Truth? Socrates in the City host Eric Metaxas sits down with Robert P. George, Princeton University Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program, to discuss his new book, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth. Their conversation delves into the nature of humanity, examining how our understanding of it influences our perception of truth, and the interplay between biblical perspectives, classical traditions, and modern philosophies. From moral contrasts to reflections on great philosophers, they examine belief, feeling, and the shared foundations of truth.

Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. Did you ever see the movie The Blobs starring Steve McQueen? The blood-curdling threat of The Blob. Well, way back when, Eric had a small part in that film, but they had to cut his scene because the blob was supposed to eat him. But he kept spitting him out. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest.

Eric the Texas! Hey there, folks. You've joined us at that time of the week where I do a new segment on this program. Every week we do one of these is called Everything You Always Want to Know About God, but we're afraid to ask. I wrote a book 20 years ago called Everything You Always Want to Know About God, but we're afraid to ask. It's just fun Q&A questions about God.

I wrote a sequel called Everything Else You Always Want to Know About God, I'm afraid to ask. And then I wrote a third book, which makes it a trilogy. And that third book was called Everything Always Want to Know About God, but we're afraid to ask the Jesus edition. So every week we're going to be doing a segment like this one where I read some stuff or comments on some stuff from the book. Just a lot of fun material. So last week we were talking about the existence of God.

Can you prove God exists? And I ended by saying that I think you can in many ways, but the most compelling argument for the existence of God, which I actually wrote about in one of my recent books called Is Atheism? dead has to do with what's called fine tuning or the design of the universe where you look at things and you say this couldn't have just happened. It looks like there had to be a designer. And the one that I want to start with today or the example of that, which I find very compelling,

has to do with the sizes of the sun and the moon and their distances from Earth. So Grace Payne, you're my interlocutor in these segments. So can I start with that? I've just got it right here. Please. Yeah. Okay. So this is about the sizes of the sun of the moon and their distances from Earth.

And this might sound a little bit odd. So hang with me. Okay. All right. So first of all, we've got to establish some stuff. As everyone must agree, the sun is about 93 million miles from. the Earth. Grace, will you agree with that? I will.

Thank you. Then you're falling into my trap. Okay. Would you agree that the moon is about 240,000 miles from the Earth? About so. Okay. All right. So anybody can get these figures and do the math themselves. But what these two figures lead to, as your calculator will show, is that the distance from us here on Earth to the sun is almost exactly 400 times the distance from us here on Earth to the moon. Are you with me so far? I'm with you.

Okay. All right. So this is where it gets weird. And when I discovered this, like when I wrote the book, everything always wants to know about God I'm afraid to ask, I think it was like I was using a Britannica. I was actually like looking this up in the pages of an encyclopedia. And I found that, you know, the distance from Earth to the Sun, as I just said, 93 million miles, great. Distance from the Earth to the Moon, about 240,000 miles, great.

Okay, you divide one into the other and you're like, oh, so the sun is almost exactly 400 times farther away from us than is the moon. Great. Okay, then this is where it gets very weird. the diameter of the sun is almost exactly 400 times the diameter of the moon. And what does this mean to us? Okay, so if people are tracking, distance from the earth to the sun is about 400 times that of the distance from the earth to the moon. But the diameter of the sun is almost exactly 400 times the diameter of the moon,

which means that when you look at the sun and the moon from the vantage point of Earth, they look exactly the same size. Now, you've really got to think about this to understand how loony this is. Like what are the odds that, you know, one of these things is 400 times farther away than the other? But it just happens also to be almost exactly 400 times bigger than the other, which means from our point of view, they look exactly the same size. So I'm thinking, okay, if God were designing a planet, you know, it would be kind of nice just for symmetry and beauty to get the sun and the moon, you know, to look exactly the same size,

even though they're millions of miles apart and gigantically different in size from each other. So the whole thing is at least very interesting, but it's actually much more astonishing when you look at the moons of other planets in our solar system because none of them comes close to what I have just said. It's so crazy. I mean, just to give you an example, our moon is about 1,500 miles across. The moons of Mars are 9 and 17 miles across.

They're like a couple of glorified boulders, basically. It's weird that they're even called moons. You could also realize how weird it is that we have one moon and one sun, and they look exactly the same size, all these other planets either have no moons or most of them have many, many, many moons. Jupiter has, I don't know, you know, officially 12,

but there are many more. Our planet has this mind-boggling, once in a solar system, super symmetry, one moon and one sun, that to us look precisely the same. size. It really is a bit odd. Well, yeah, that's what I keep saying.

It's at least odd. It at least makes you think. Like, that's so bizarre because we get perfect eclipses, perfect eclipses. Because, I mean, well, anybody gets that. The moon and the, the, the, the earth have to fit precisely over each other for total eclipses to occur. But they do happen almost as though it were planned. for our benefit. So I just, I really love that. That's, that's only one example of what I'm talking about.

But it was the first time that I thought, if you're honest, you have to say, that is so weird. How come I've never heard that before? And most people have never heard this before. I never heard it before. I don't even know how I stumbled on it in 2005 when I was writing the book. I thought, this just doesn't make any sense. If you're a student of astronomy, you know, at all, and you know the sizes of different moons and planets and stuff. You just think, what are the odds that our single moon would be exactly the same size as the sun from our point of view so that they fit over each other as perfectly as they do? So I think, you know, that is really compelling to me.

And I think, again, does it prove that God exists? I just want to say that I just want to give. people something to think about. And so there are a lot of examples of this in my book is atheism dead. This segment that we're doing here each week is based on my book. Everything

I always want to know about God, but we're afraid to ask. Before we go today, I want to remind you of our friends at the Herzog Foundation. If anybody listening to this program today is interested in homeschooling or you've thought about it, you don't know whether you can do it,

you're interested in getting your kids out of public schools because you understand that what they're learning there is not what you would want to teach them. Maybe you're interested in Christ-centered K-12 education. Our friends at the Herzog Foundation are there to help you. They're not asking for anything from you. They want to help you. Herzog Foundation.com is their website. Herzog is H-E-R-Z-O-G.

Herzog. Hurtzog Foundation.com. And I've said this, and I will always say it, education is everything, folks. If these kids, you know, that are getting this Marxist indoctrination in public schools, if they get the truth, this sets them up for life, and this is our future. And I keep meeting kids that have been homeschooled. And I'm amazed at their wisdom, at their knowledge. They are the hope for the future, to use a cliche.

So go to HerzogFoundation.com. I'm HerzogFoundation.com. Okay, we're out of time for this segment. Thanks for tuning in. A major retail chain just canceled a massive order, leaving my pillow with an overstock of the classic my pillows, and this is your gain, because for a limited time, my pillow is offering their entire classic collection at true wholesale prices. Get a standard my pillow for just 1798. Want more upgrade to queen size for only 2298 or king size for 2498? Snag body pillows for 2998 and versatile multi-use pillows for just 998. Give your bet a whole new pillow set only while supplies last.

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my pillow for only 1798, only while supplies last. Welcome back to Eric Socrates in the city conversation with Dr. Robert George. Conformity with what we can figure out using the old noggin, perhaps by the experimental methods of science or by some other methods. But it's conformity with rationality. Now, again, we need to be careful not to exaggerate that or allow it to mislead us because while there were some Enlightenment figures who were hardcore dogmatic secularists, many were not. Many were men of faith. But there's truth in the idea that the Enlightenment period in Europe was the age of reason.

Well, if the medieval period was the age of faith, then the Enlightenment was the age of reason, in what age do we live today? And here's where the danger is. I regret to say, my dear brother Eric, that we live in the age of feeling. Because instead of faith or reason, or as I would prefer, faith and reason together being the touchstone of truth, of goodness, of justice, we've in many cases, many people, especially many young people, treat feeling, emotion as the touchstone, as the guide to truth. and that's how we get ridiculous ideas floating about, like the idea that you have your truth and I have my truth and there's no such thing as the truth. And until we overcome that idea and get back to faith and reason, I hope operating together as the two wings,

in the words of John Paul II, the late Pontiff, two wings on which the human spirit ascends the contemplation of the truth, until we get back to that, we're going to be going down a very bad road where it would be very easy to justify more and more atrocities, especially in the area of biomedical ethics, justify more and more atrocities on the basis of how I feel. I knew this would happen talking to you, Robbie,

that I want to go in so many different directions. We'll just have to have you back. I mean, we still have time. But I want to talk to you about some of the figures that you mentioned toward the end of the book, the first of whom is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I'm sorry to say that there are many people who probably don't know anything about Solzhenitsyn.

We take for granted because of our age that everybody must know who Solzhenitsyn is. Alas, I wish. But talk a little bit about Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It's a great figure. A prophet raising his voice against Soviet communist totalitarianism and expansionism. For our young viewers who may not know the name

or know anything about him, even if the name is one that they've heard before, he suffered in the Soviet gulag. He was a writer, a novelist. In the great tradition of figures like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russia, it's a great novelist. And because his ideas,

threatened the Soviet gangster leadership. He was put in prison in the Gulag, where he did some of his greatest writing. And then when they released him from prison, and he was by now an acclaimed and prize-winning international human rights advocate, he came to the United States as an exile. And when he was here, while he was here in 1978, he was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard. Before you go on, I have to say, thinking back to the 70s and thinking back to who Solzhenitsyn was

when he was invited by Harvard. It tells us a lot about where we are today and where we were then. The idea that Harvard would invite Solzhenitsyn was because everyone at that time could agree, on the brutal depravity of how the Soviet Union treated its political enemies like Solzhenitsyn. So he was a hero in a way that it's hard for us to think of anybody in that way today. He was indeed, and it was to Harvard's credit.

Harvard, a very liberal institution. I happen to be there in 1978. It was a student at Harvard Law School at the time. I wasn't within the walls at the ceremony, but I could hear the speech over the loudspeaker. And Harvard was a very liberal place in those days. There's no question about that. And there were lots of people who were falling into the error of believing a kind of moral equivalency. Well, the Soviet Union may be bad, but, you know, we're not so good either,

and we're imperialist and we're expansionist. And, you know, it was a really defective view. I mean, that's not to say that we shouldn't acknowledge our faults. That's good, that we should have some humility ourselves about the wrongs that we have done, beginning with the great sin of slavery. And yet, you know, by 1978 to suppose that the Soviet Union and the United States were moral equivalence was disgusting. And everyone expected Solzhenitsin to condemn that view. But I think Harvard was surprised.

and probably not completely happy with what they got from Solzhenitsyn. They knew he would condemn Soviet gangsterism. I don't think they were prepared for what he gave them, gave us, which was a critique of the West, a critique of the West for its vices, for the kind of expressive individualism to use the label given to the dominant theology,

of our time. It was there in 78. It's here today. The name given by the great late Berkeley sociologist, Robert Bella. It's what ultimately gives us this ridiculous idea of your truth and my truth. Well, I mean, you could also call it secular materialism. Secular materialism. And Solzhenitsyn, who was a great Christian figure, a Eastern Orthodox Christian, Russian Orthodox Christian, Russian Orthodox Christian,

he gave a profound critique on that day of Western secularism. He would develop that five years later when he received the Templeton Prize, in a speech in which he declared that the fundamental errors of the West that have led to our loss of courage, our loss of integrity, are falling into vices like widespread pornography and promiscuity and drugs and so forth, that at the bottom he said, it's because man, men have forgotten God. Here he's actually echoing one of our own great historical prophets. Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of the Civil War in 1863, Eric,

in declaring a day of prayer and fasting, a day of repentance in the midst of the war, argued in his statement that this carnage, this war had come on us because we as a people have forgotten God. This is exactly the message basically of the Old Testament prophets. It's the message at the end of the day

of all true prophets. We need to remember God. Remember that we are under authority, that we do not get to make up reality. There's a reality over against us that it's our job to understand and to live

in line with. Well, it's there's really almost nobody like Solzhenitin. I mean, the idea that he would suffer as he did under the brutality of Soviet communism and then come to the

West, a hero, celebrated as a hero, and then given this plumb spot to be the speaker at graduation and then to do what he did. It's extraordinary. But as you say, I mean, he's pointing us like all true prophets must do to God. And it's interesting to me because I'm writing a book on the American Revolution now. And I'm fascinated with how this was the Puritan view and this was absolutely John Adams' view that if we, turn to God, we can win

this war. We have to be concerned with that. We have to be, I mean, obviously, Lincoln said, we have to make sure that we're on gods. It's not whether God is on our side. It's whether we're on God side. Yeah. And Adams strongly champions that idea. And I think that is where we are now in the culture, is that there's this question of, is there such thing as a transcendent

reality, is there such thing as truth? And then what is our job at this point? Eric, I'd like to make a plea, even to those who, in good faith, good people, doing their best, can't find their way. I know people like this, at least not yet able to find their way to belief in a personal god. Before we go today, I want to remind you of our friends at the Herzog Foundation. If anybody listening to this program today is interested in homeschooling, or you've thought about it, you don't know whether you can do it. you're interested in getting your kids out of public schools because you understand that what they're learning there is not what you would want to teach them.

Maybe you're interested in Christ-centered K-12 education. Our friends at the Herzog Foundation are there to help you. They're not asking for anything from you. They want to help you. Herzog Foundation.com is their website. Herzog is H-E-R-Z-O-G, Hurtzog. Hurtzog Foundation.com. And I've said this, and I will always say it, education is everything, folks.

If these kids, you know, that are getting this Marxist indoctrination in public schools, if they get the truth, this sets them up for life. HerzogFoundation.com. HurtzogFoundation.com. We continue our Socrates in the city conversation with Dr. Robert George. And it's our job to try to understand. reality, be in touch with reality, and live in line with reality, including moral reality. We can do that, even if we don't have what some would call the gift of faith.

I know my great friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, you must know, Professor Mansfield. He's not himself a religious believer. He's got great respect for the Christian and Jewish traditions. He's certainly very warm to believers. He's been the mentor of many students, doctoral students and others who are Christian or believing Jewish people. And yet he can't find his way to faith. Nevertheless, he's able to model what it means to strive for truth, to discover truth, however imperfectly, and then to try to live in line with truth.

We all ought to aspire at a minimum to that. Well, I mean, you're touching on what I said earlier about being on team. reality. I think we're at a point where things have gone so haywire that people, whether it's Richard Dawkins or J.K. Rowling, anybody who senses the madness says, well, wait a minute, there's this thing called reality. We have to deal with this. And I think increasingly, as people do that, in reaction to the madness, that we say, wait a minute, there's this thing called reality. agree on the basics. Richard Dawkins would agree on the biological basis.

There's male and female, and there's this thing called reality. I would say that that's God's way by forcing us to live in reality or as part of reality of helping us grope our way toward him, even if we're not conscious of that. Agreed. Agreed. The way I have put it on Twitter. elsewhere is anybody who sincerely with a pure heart is seeking the truth is kin to me. He might be Catholic as I am.

He might be evangelical Protestant. He might be Eastern Orthodox. He might be Jewish. He might be Muslim. He might be Mormon. He might be Buddhist. He might be an atheist. But if he's sincerely seeking the truth,

and especially if he's prepared courageously to speak the truth as best, he's given to understand the truth, then he is kin to me. That is my brother. I'm radically where you are. I've said almost the same thing, not as eloquently, but I think that that's,

it's fascinating that we're finding ourselves in that kind of a cultural moment. And it gives me great hope, frankly, that things have gone crazy enough that a lot of people are waking up and say, wait a minute, let's see if we can reason our way forward. We call that in academia, Eric, the vibe shift.

I was wondering where that came from. Of course it came from academia. The old vibe shift. Yes, we're in the midst of a vibe shift. Now, there are other figures you talk about in the book, and I want to touch on them, but say what you were going to say before I do that. Well, I was going to talk a bit about the vibe shift.

How that cashes out, for example, for my students at Princeton with whom I've discussed this, and they all agree there's been a significant vibe shift over the last year or two, really the last year. There's been a difference in the tone on campus, and more importantly, a difference in the questions you're allowed to raise and the ideas that you are allowed to subject to questioning and criticism. A year and a half, two years ago,

there were people who knew that there were big problems at the heart of gender ideology or transgender ideology, but they didn't feel they could safely speak up about them or raise questions about them, much less challenge them. But that's changed now. That's the vibe shift. You can now raise questions about that. Or aspects of DEI ideology, which, you know, were dogmatic orthodoxies at Princeton or Harvard,

a University of Illinois or University of Kansas until about a year or so ago. And now it's possible to raise questions in class or out of class, in the dining hall or in the dorms late at night. you no longer have to worry about being expelled from the human race or rendered a non-person or defamed on social media. And how did that happen? It's like a fever broke. It's like a fever broke.

I think that's right. People got sick of it. I think the election, especially the fact that Donald Trump not only won the electoral vote, but even the popular vote, made it clear that woke ideology does not enjoy anything approaching majority support in this country and things are going in the wrong direction in terms of popular opinion for the

woke ideologues. In any case, however it happened, it happened and it makes a real difference for the kinds of conversations that you can have on campus now. I'm pretty sure he only won because of Russian interference but I don't

I don't want to go on. This is not the time to adjudicate that question. I want to talk to you about some of the other figures you mentioned at the end of the book. You mentioned Heinrich Heine. Talk about Heine. Remarkable story that I relate in the book. Heine was a German, Jewish Christian poet in the early part of the 19th century. And around 1830, Eric, he published some essays on religious Christian.

and society, in which he noted, with great emphasis, the fact that Germany was losing its historic Christian faith, especially losing the moral substance of the Christian faith. And he warned, in language that only a great poet could come up with, he warned that when, Christianity falls, and it is falling in Germany. Intellectually, it is collapsing in Germany. When it falls, then those Teutonic gods, those warlike gods that have been buried for a thousand years. We continue our Socrates in the city conversation with Dr. Robert George.

Eric, a hundred years before the rise of Hitler, Heinrich Heine, predicted the Nazi atrocities. He didn't use the name National Socialism or Nazism. He didn't talk about Hitler or a guy with a little mustache, but he saw that something would happen as a result of the collapse of Christian morality in Central Europe that would make the French Revolution look like nothing,

look like just innocent fun, an innocent idol. I mean, how prophetic is that? It's prophetic. It's prophetic. prophetic. There's no question. I'm always fascinated by figures who speak prophetically without knowing that they're speaking prophetically. He wouldn't have said, I'm a prophetically. He just would think, well, it stands to reason. He said something particular about standing to reason. It's something we would do well to take on board. Please, all viewers, listen to this.

He said, thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. what happens in the domain of the visible first happened in the domain of the invisible, in the domain of the intellect. Bad ideas, the replacement of Judeo-Christian morality with a kind of neo-pagan, the worst kind of neo-pagan ideology,

doesn't stop in the realm of ideas. It caches out in dead bodies, in atrocities, in carnage. Thought proceeds, action as thunder precedes lightning. We need to take that lesson on board. Oh, it's, we certainly do, and it's, it's a chilling prophecy, because we know what happened. I don't think you quote it in this chapter here, but I quoted in my Bonhofer book. He says, I'm not sure if it's in the same essay, but he said, Heine said, where books are burned, human beings will be burned also.

who could have dreamt well. I mean, human beings, of course, had been literally burnt at the stake for centuries when he said that. Not in the kind of mass. Well, certainly not, no, obviously. But it does seem that he's prophetically speaking of what happened under the Nazis. And of course, the Nazis did really explicitly, I mean, often privately, but nonetheless explicitly,

reject the Christian God. They explicitly, Eric, revived Teutonic paganism. Their marriage ceremonies were pagan marriage ceremonies. They were invoking the German gods, the ancient Teutonic gods

precisely for their warlike character in contrast to the gentleness and love ethic of Christianity. And I think we would say we, you and I being Christians, that those gods are demons. That's the horror, that you open the door to the demonic. And that to me is exactly what happened in Germany. But it's interesting to me that in the 1830s already Heine saw this. I'm not really familiar

with German cultural history of the early 19th century. Do you say what it was the time of German unification? And, you know, what he's perceiving is what's happening in the intellectual culture. Not so much on the ground. That would come, he knew, because changes in the domain of the intellect, thought, end up cashing out in the domain of the visible. Bad ideas have consequences. Now, what that doesn't mean, Eric, it doesn't mean we should ban bad ideas. Right.

You can't do that. It's a wrong way. Correct. You meet bad ideas with good ideas. Which takes us back to 17th century England and John Milton's aereopagitica. I'm fascinated that that is debated today, whether we ought to have free speech.

These things that you and I perhaps thought self-evident, suddenly there are a couple of generations that aren't so sure that free speech is self-evidently the right way to go. It's remarkable, Eric. I'm a little older than you are, but I'm certainly old enough to remember. I think you probably are. When free speech was considered a liberal value. A left-wing value. And maybe it was conservatives who weren't quite so strict about free speech. Well, today, at least in academic culture and universities were like the one in which I teach, if you say free speech, that's code for conservatism. That's considered a right-wing idea. When did that happen?

The fundamental case for free speech is the case that's made by figures like Milton and John Stuart Mill. I've spent much of my career, as you know, Eric, being a critic of the kind of liberalism that John Stuart Mill represents. And yet, I have to acknowledge, Mill gives us an excellent argument for freedom of speech in the second chapter of his great essay on Liberty, where he says that free speech, like other fundamental freedoms, is not an abstract right.

It's not just an implication of fairness. I should let you say what you want because I want you to let me say what I want. No, he says free speech is important because it serves a value. And the value above all that it serves is the value of truth-seeking with a view to getting, or at least getting as close as we can get, to the truth. We're all going to have in our heads, at any given moment of our lives, a mixture of true and false beliefs.

Some of the beliefs in our heads will be true, some will be false. Now, the question is, how can we maximize the number of true beliefs and minimize the number of false beliefs? How do we swap the false beliefs out of our head for true beliefs? Here's one way not to do it. If I shut down your right to challenge me, or if I turn away and won't listen to you challenge me, if I will only listen to people who confirm me in what I already believe, well, yes, she'll confirm me in what I believe that happens to be true,

but you'll also confirm me in what I believe that happens to be false, and I'm not going to get anywhere toward the truth. We should respect free speech, not because there is no truth, but for the very opposite reason, that free speech serves the good of truth-seeking. And that means above all in institutions whose fundamental purpose

for existing is truth-seeking, colleges and universities. You need free speech. You need free speech the way the human body or any organism needs oxygen in order to live. Without free speech, intellectual life does. Welcome back to Eric Socrates

in the city conversation with Dr. Robert George. Both of us remember the famous story in Skokie, Illinois, of the neo-Nazis marching through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. I believe the ACLU at the time defended the right of the neo-Nazis to do that. Obviously didn't agree with it, but nonetheless defended their right to do that. I mean, this is why I've been joined with colleagues. to found the Academic Freedom Alliance

to do the kind of work that the ACLU or the American Association of University professors should be doing. But they have been captured. They've gone in a kind of woke ideological direction. So they're not standing up for the values that they used to at least proclaim. And so we need new organizations to do that,

and the Academic Freedom Alliance is one of them. We just got a couple of minutes, and I wanted to make sure we talked about banjo playing. Yes. I've had the joy of listening to you play the banjo. And the last chapter of, at the end of the book, you talk about Ralph Stanley. Talk a little bit about who he was and why he's in your book.

Well, first, Eric, I want to assure your viewers, since you've outed me as a banjo player, that I came by my banjo playing, honestly. I was born and brought up in North Central, West Virginia in the heart of Appalachia, Both my grandfathers were coal miners. People who are watching the video can tell, obviously, that you come from Appalachian. There I am, see.

And banjos are issued to little boys at birth where I come from. So I came by my banjo playing honestly. But I love the bluegrass banjo. I love bluegrass music. It was the soundtrack of my childhood hunting and fishing and playing bluegrass music. I mean you're not rod and gun clothes. You mean this is true. Everything I've just said is true.

When I arrived at college, I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore, and I like to say that I arrived at college from North Central West Virginia, shoeless with a banjo on my back. The banjo on my back part is true. The shoeless is metaphorical, yeah. But the banjo on my back part is true. So as a bluegrass lover and as a bluegrass banjo player in particular, I had three great heroes.

They were the founders of the bluegrass method of playing the banjo, so-called three-finger method of playing the banjo. Earl Scruggs is the most. famous and probably the one who deserves the lion's share of the credit. I have great respect for Scruggs as a musician. Men named Don Reno. Scruggs was from North Carolina. Reno was from Tennessee was another great one that has certainly influenced my playing. And then the third was Ralph Stanley. He wasn't quite a West Virginia, but he was about as close as you can be. He was from Western Virginia, from the Quinch Mountain area of Virginia. And he played the most traditional kind of bluegrass

music, that which was closest to the old-fashioned mountain music. And not only was he a great banjo player, he was a unself-conscious, but in his own way, prophetic Christian believer. His music and his faith were integrated. And it was the integration of his music, which I love, with his faith. He's an evangelical and I'm a Catholic, but it's a shared Christian faith. The faith that we share that caused me to include in the book the tribute that I wrote to him when he died a few years ago. I remember Eric he was being interviewed, just as you're interviewing me, but his interviewer was a PBS interviewer. I've forgotten the man's name. But the PBS interviewer was asking him about his life and his music. And Stanley was quite unselfconsciously telling

his story. And of course, Faith was at the heart of his story. and he wasn't just talking about his faith. He was proclaiming his faith to the PBS interviewer as he was telling his story. And you could see the interviewer like a deer in the headlights very uncomfortable in this situation, uncomfortable even with the discussion of faith, much less the public display of faith.

But Stanley was oblivious to it. He just went on, and it was most remarkable experience. Well, I'm so sorry we're out of time, but it's just a joy. to speak with you, Robbie. Thanks for everything you do at Princeton and elsewhere. Thanks for the book, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, Law and Morality in our cultural moment. Thank you.

It's my pleasure, Eric. Good to be with you.