The Ricochet Podcast - New Beginnings

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

We have a special Christmas season episode to tide everyone over through the holidays. Steve Hayward sits down with Rob Long, who's just wrapped his first year at Princeton's Theological Seminary. They discuss dramatic career changes, the storyteller's take on the link between show business and the saving souls business, and the modern cultural discomfort with the faith of our fathers.

Well, hi, everybody. It's Steve Hayward here with a special holiday episode of the Rikersh podcast. It's just me in conversation with Rob Long, one of Rickshay's co-founders, well known to nearly all of you, of course. And I thought, who better to talk about Christmas and the meaning of religion than our own in-house seminarian? And so without further ado, here's me and Rob. Well, I'm delighted to have one of Ricochet's co-founders, Rob Long, join me for this special year-end episode. I have for the longest time been wanting to talk to Rob about this midlife change from Hollywood to theology, from the studio to the church.

And partly because, I mean, a fellow Christian, of course, but also because it parallels a trajectory of a very good friend of mine who unfortunately passed away in his early 50s after deciding to leave a very successful legal career to go to seminary and become ordained. So in other words, your story, Rob, sounds familiar to me. And the reasoning is interesting. But anyway, listeners, you won't be able to see this, of course. But at first I thought, what are you lighting up there, Rob? Is that incense? Since your high church, well, no. We, we, I'd be very, very much in favor of it. If it were incense, I do have incense in the house. I had to tell you, I'm like, I am kind of an

incense freak. This is a cigar. It was a, it just wrapped up on Friday. exams and papers I had much to do and I'm here to tell you it's very very a lot of school is harder than it was when I was a student last time I was a student 40 years ago

but it's easier in a lot of ways and I am an unabashed fan of AI you you plug in your sources it spits out a bibliography that's perfectly

perfectly formatted. It double-checked your footnotes for you. I could, I sent in, I uploaded my paper and I said, make sure I didn't, you know, repeat any language from these sources that I didn't, that I didn't cite. And it does, I don't know, this may be boring to people, but I'm just telling you, among the other things I'm evangelizing,

I'm evangelizing for AI, which is probably about, that's what I mean, that's what's going to get me into trouble more than anything else, probably. Well, I'm tempted to joke that hopefully it can catch you from lapsing into any Armenian heresies or something. Well, all right. Almost all of our listeners are familiar with you, longtime listeners of Rikers and so forth, and the martini shot and whatnot. But just for, you know, let's do a 30-second potted biography, which I think I can kind of do, but add in what I've left out. You're born and raised in the Baltimore area?

born and then we moved to I moved around a lot so as we're born there and I'm on I'm driving there right now I mean I'm not driving now I pulled away pull over but I yeah I was born there and then we lived in Europe and then Northern California where I kind of spent most of my sort of growing up times and then went away to school and then I was in New England and that's that you know right yeah I see I didn't know that you moved around a bunch I just remembered the Baltimore anchor and then you went to Yale measured in fine arts I think or something like that oh English, something even more or less remunerative, yeah. Right, and then you stuck out for Hollywood where you were a great success for a very long time. And then Hollywood got weird. We may come to a little of that here at the end, but you've certainly talked about how the industry's changed a lot on this show and on your, and on martini shot and so forth. So it's like a lot of things, it's no longer the fun it used to be.

I can tell that from afar. Well, so here's the big question. You know, after all these years working in common. mostly in television, you decided to go to seminary in middle age and to become ordained. And so the cynics and haters are, by the way, thank you, thank you for saying middle age. Well, I'm a few years older than you, only a few happily, and I'm still clinging to middle age too. So now the cynics and haters are going to say, ah, Rob, you know, the rhino, the ones who think of you as a writer.

Is this a mid-life crisis? What precipitated this idea? This is really a big thing to do. Yeah, I mean, I guess. I'm trying to, hold on, I have a little piece of cigar. Downside is smoking and so. You know, I'm a writer. I was a writer for a long time.

I still am a writer. And at a certain point, you want to write about stuff that's more and more important to you, more and more important to me. and a certain time you kind of want to, especially if you write screenplays and scripts, you want to write about yourself and you want to write about what you're thinking about, not necessarily dialogue for somebody else. And then I think, I mean, this is a larger, this is sort of a larger part of why I feel called to this,

but these are big, the big things are still big. And just because we don't think about them or the culture doesn't think about them or we trivialize them doesn't make them any smaller. You know, it's like they always say like the, I preached a sermon on Sunday. And one of the images I said was, you know, Niagara Falls is like a 40 million gallons of water go over the cliff of Niagara Falls every minute. And it's like 90 decibels. It's like two leaf blowers going all the time. But if you live near Niagara Falls, you just don't hear it anymore. And I feel like that's kind of how we are about these big thoughts.

Like, what are we doing here? What's our purpose? What's our, what's our purpose to our, our own potential? And what's our, what are our, what are we called to do with everyone else on the planet? And those, I don't know, I, the place where people think these things through, for me, is church. And the, and the figure that seems to have the most, make the most sense and have the most, impact was Jesus. So, you know, start there. Yeah, I mean, this may sound odd, but there are, I'll say there's two things that most people don't like to think about. One is the abyss,

you know, the terror of the abyss. But then the other one is God. And for the, for the inherent reason that, at least in the monotheistic faith traditions, God is unknowable by definition. I can say more about that if we want, right? And then plus, I mean, that's just on the, what you might say, the philosophical theological level, you can't, there's a reason we call it faith and reason or reason in revelation, right? Right. And yet theology is the attempt to reason about God to the extent we can. And that, you know, footnotes to 100 different books to follow, right? Right, right. I agree with you completely, by the way. I'm of that same disposition. I'm fascinated by both theology and philosophy, and they overlap a lot. On the other hand, I can see it's not

for everybody. It's kind of a rarefied inclination. it's one thing to go to church every week and read some good books and so forth. It's another one then to say, I'm going to throw in 100% like you have. Well, yeah, I mean, I kind of feel like I don't want to give anybody the wrong impression. I am, I'm not the biggest fan of theology. And I, and I, and I, I see the irony there that I am in fact at a place called Princeton Theological Seminary. You know, sometimes I think theology is just a lot of words we wrote to solve a problem that we created with our own words. So, you know, we're, you know, basically getting ourselves out of a maze that we set for

ourselves. And, and I think sometimes, you know, you could, I could read, you know, I have now, I do it now not for a living, but I do it now as a vocation. I read a lot of theology. And sometimes I just find myself like, oh, my God, I've read five pages of this and I have no idea what this person is talking about. And they're not even German, you know, they're like, this is actually somebody who speaks English as the first language.

So, you know, I think the. experience of, and I sometimes feel like the other words, theology and all the language we use is a way for us to sort of navigate and negotiate the, you know, the red print in the Bible, the New Testament, the stuff that Jesus says. So he says these incredibly impossible things, right? You know, love your name. This is people always say, he says, forgive your enemies. No, he doesn't say that.

He says, love your enemies. Much harder. I can't forgive my enemies. Yeah, they're forgiven. I can't love them. Give to all who ask. all that stuff give away your stuff um if you have two coats give one away and so those are pretty clear right so some of theology i think is designed for 2 000 years to figure out what else he

might have meant aside from those really difficult things because we're not doing those things um we're gonna we we'll try to come up with some other things we can do uh and i look that that's a human that's a human impulse it's a human invasion which is fine but i i kind of feel like um the just to be a slightly Christian chauvinist here for a minute. The singular thing about Christianity is that Jesus says that you are important. Your euneness is important. Your steveness is important. You will leave the flock for you, Steve, for me, rock.

Not because we belong to a tribe or we belong to a culture or because we have a Dharma or we have a rank that we need to live out. It's because of who specifically we are. That is a radical. earth-changing concept. There has, that changed human nature, that changed the way human beings think of themselves. And I don't know, that seems worth, I got a couple years to spend just learning that. And then if I'm lucky, you know, God willing and the people consenting, I, I, I would like to spend the rest of my little summers that the Lord is giving me to, to talk about that. Yeah, so, I mean, it's taken up, actually, I think we're still figuring out.

the implications of what you just said, because, I mean, I tend to run off because, you know, my backgrounds in political philosophy to the political dimension, which was the New Testament teaches that our identity, our worth, does not depend on the nation we live in. And it takes a long time, you know, Machiavelli comes along and, you know, 1300 years later, says, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, that's really bad, right? That's part of his complaint. And then, but then, you know, in a certain extent, what we call the liberal tradition grows out of all that, right? Okay. That's the subject for another day. But you have been, I think, a lifelong Episcopalian.

That's that. Yeah, which, you know, with all the intensity of that entails, yeah. Well, look, I know the jokes are our friend, Andrew Claven, who, you know, converted from Judaism to evangelical Christianity. Someone said, are you an Episcopalian? He said, no, I'm a real Christian. Yeah. He said, what he said, the way he put it to me, he goes, well, you know, call me when you are joining a religion that believes in God. Yeah, right.

Well, the reason I brought that up is it does seem to me that liturgical denominations, you know, Catholics, Episcopalians, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, they tend to be much more, part of because of the liturgical form of worship, they tend to be much more or put much more emphasis on serious in-depth theological study. I think that's fair to say. I think that's probably fair, yeah. I mean, also, they have a, they are, they come out of the early church tradition of doing exactly that. So they aren't, I mean, you can make the cases of Anglican and some mainline Protestants are a reformed.

But even by being reformed, you're still choosing the foundation of the church. So you're going back to the fact. I mean, all the reformers, even the Anglicans said, well, we're more Catholic than we're. They've lost their way, and we're back to what, you know, so less secure, right? You don't really, not a non-denominational churches, which are incredibly vibrant, don't, they don't, I don't think they have that as their, you know, the DNA. Yeah. Now, you used the word, I want to go back and ask you what is, I guess, this is a deeply

personal question. You used a key word to me anyway when you said, called. This is a calling. Now, there's, you know, a couple of ways of thinking about that. one is, and I've had a clergy friend of mine who said from an early age, they felt they had received the call of God in that spiritual transcendental sense. And by the way, one of them was an Episcopalian who went into his bishop and said, the bishop said, why do you want to be a priest?

He said, because I've been called by God. And he said, most of his friends said, you told the bishop, what? But there's also, I mean, the other way of thinking about it is it's a consequent logic. And so, you know, when you said called, how do you mean it? Or what is that, how is that manifested self to you? Well, as a good Episcopalian, I am uncomfortable talking about these issues, right? I mean, you know, how do you make an Episcopalian look at his shoes? You mentioned, you mentioned Jesus or money.

Like, that's how you get up. So, but I do remember going and talking to the rector of the church I went to in Manhattan, I still go to. And I was talking to her about my first time in that church. And not my first time, but the first time I went to that church just to go to his service. So I've been there for weddings and stuff. And, you know, the candles were lit. It was a night.

It's a 6 p.m. Sunday service, which is beautiful. And I sort of walked in there for, I don't know why. And she said to me, she said, so you think maybe the Holy Spirit was guiding you into the church? And I sort of looked at it. I said, I don't know. And she said, does that make you uncomfortable that I said that? He said, yes, it makes me uncomfortable. So, I call the call, you know, partly I think that if you can, if you want to deepen your

experience with faith or you want to deepen your experience as a writer, you're going to have to get called to learn something about big stuff. Also, I kind of feel like the great thing about, one of the great things, I should say, about the Christian faith is that it's kind of a what now faith and that you you know Jesus knows us so well um and by the way I don't think you even have to believe in the divinity of Jesus to be to say most of what I'm about to say is that he knows us so well he knows people so well that he knows what terrifies us deep down which is as you put it like is this all there is. Am I unlovable? Am I unloved? If my people in my life who loved me knew who I really was,

would they still love? Am I alone? And Jesus says, okay, in order, I'll tell you, you are not unloved. You are a beloved child of God. You are not alone. I am always with you. I know you, and I love you, right? The colloquy for purity, which we say in Pissible faith, is God to whom all, from whom no secrets are hid, to whom all desires are known. And then finally, you are an heir to everlasting life. So I've taken, you know, if Jesus was there,

he's said, so I've taken care of your big fears. Now what? So if you accept that, even if you accept that that is a destination of a journey that you're on, that full belief and experience. The question is still is now what? Okay, now are you going to do with all that? And for me, it was like, okay, well, if I believe all that,

I guess I should do something with it. I guess I should put it into practice. And I know people can put it into practice a million different ways, but mine was like, I want to write about this. I want to preach about this. I want to celebrate the foundational prayer, the Eucharistic prayer that we have, which is kind of a, all of those things all wrapped up in one thing.

Yeah. Um, that's, that's gotta, and I, you know, I wish I could say, no, listen, I really felt the Holy Spirit guiding me and God came and I was, you know, Jesus sat next to me, the bus stop and told me, here's what you got to do. But I haven't, I don't, I don't, that is, I haven't had that experience, but I definitely have been led somewhere by something somehow. And I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I decided to stop, I've decided to stop, uh, tuning that part out, you know, but. Well, I mean, look, I'm all one for theological modesty, even if I'd heard a voice from the wilderness or from the bush or something, I think I'd be reluctant to say so openly or directly myself. So I certainly get that. But it's one of those mysteries of faith, right, that we have to live with and accept that we are not going to be able to conquer that 100%. Yeah, and look, if you believe the first step, which is that, you know, he's everywhere, he's inside you, and he's a part of you, and you just tuned it out. You just need to tune that part back in. You know, like, you could be a classic Freudian and still believe that's the case.

I happen to think that it's something more universal. But the practice of it is the same for me. And once I cross that line, I'm like, oh, cool, what am I really going to go? I mean, look, I would love, I think I've told you this before. You know, I have a friend of mine who's a rector of a church on Cape Cod. And he's an old guy, he grew up in his Roman Catholic family in Rhode Island, like 90,000 brothers and sisters. But he wanted to get married, but he also wanted to be a priest. So it's really only one path for him, which is Piscopal priest.

And he said, he said, well, why do you want to do this? And I said, you know, I gave him all those reasons. And I said, you know, and also look, I'm at, I got to be honest, there's a 10% of me wants to wear that collar into a network comedy pitch meeting. Oh. And pitch a show and see what they do. And he goes, okay, well, that's not as bad as I, what I thought you were going to make. He said, you should also know this, that when you get ordained, they give you a card that you can put on your dash and you can park anywhere. And he said, that is not a reason to do this, but it's not not a reason to do this.

Like, you know, so all these, you know, I like to think that's a small portion of my call, but it's not, it's not nothing. Well, I'm going to look, toward the end, I want to come to Hollywood and the world of the clergy. Because I forget who said it. It might have been Churchill who said a joke is a very serious thing. And so I'm trying to, but I do want to linger on theology what you're doing right now and do it stay a little bit in chronology. So like you say, I totally get it when you say that theology can be kind of off-putting and dance and all the rest of that. So tell me a little bit about your first year of studies. Is it what you expected, either academically or theologically? Has it been hard to learn?

different languages in middle age, which, you know, you say, you know, you can't learn a language after you're 18 or something. I'm not really true. Well, I'm, I'm here to tell you that is, that is absolutely true. You can't. You should not do it. But I, on Friday, I was sort of like my direct midpoint. So it's a three-year program.

I've been a year and a half. So Friday last, the fall semester was over on Friday. And I spent some time struggling with Greek. And I thought, okay, well, you know, if you, and Princeton is a process. Presbyterian school, basically, started by Presbyterians who are incredibly impressive intellectually. And if you're a Presbyterian and you have a Presbyterian pastor, buy him a drink or something, because he really knows stuff. You have to know Greek and Hebrew. And to be an Episcopalian, you just kind of don't have to know those.

You have to be familiar with him, but that's about it. Like, they don't, there's no test. So I struggle through Greek, and I think I might do Hebrew in an intense short class at some point. between now and the time I graduate, just so I know a little bit about it. And I can look stuff up meaningfully. So there was that part. And then there's the other part,

which is sort of the classic dense, you know, Carl Barth style theology, which is interesting. And in many cases, really compelling and arresting. I tend to squirrel my way around. So like the, you know, the occasional Carl Barth writings, and letters are great.

And I kind of like, oh, maybe I'll just stick with those. You know, I won't pick up this big book. The history of the church is fascinating, of course. That's been really fun to study that. Mostly because it's just an early church anyway, it's just a series of gruesome tortures and 200 years of persecution, then followed by 1,000 years of political power.

You know, it's fun to read how quickly they all changed the minute Constantine said, okay, I'm one of you. Suddenly, they got very different. But my classmates, I've been really surprised by my classmates. They're young. You know, I'm the oldest person in the, I'm the oldest person in the room, mostly, because my professors are younger than I am too. So there's that experience, it's kind of weird.

But it's really fun because they are, if you're feeling pessimistic about the future, You should just come and sit in on a class because they're sort of thoughtful and compassionate and struggling to make it all make sense, which in an incredibly Christian way, I mean, capital C and small C, which is really kind of, I find them, I really admire them. Yeah, I know. I occasionally will dust off some Carl Bart to try and read and then give up after a while. But there are two things about it. I mean, his most famous work is that, what, six-volume church dogmatics, right? But one of the fun things about that is, is that he said somewhere, something along the lines of systematic theology is an oxymoron. And that's why he wrote dogmatics instead of systematic theology.

So that's sort of inclined to, I think, what you were saying. And the other thing was, you know, in German, not that matters, except we all use a German word sometimes to make us sound more sophisticated. He said God's was Gonsonder, meaning holy other, meaning because God is one, he's not intelligible than normal human ways. And I'm always taking that to heart, because that's what set him at odds against, say, Thomas Aquinas and Catholics. Okay, I don't want to geek out too much on particular things. Hey, man, I'm on vacation.

Yeah, I know. Well, all right. Let me pose the question to you this way. I say I actually put those guys down. At one point in life, I was sort of passingly familiar with some of the leading theologians who were controversial like Rudolph Boltman 30 years ago. And so I'm sort of wondering, I'll ask this question two or three different forms and grab whichever one you want. Who are, in your mind, are some of the more notable theologians writing today or

recently? And who have been, if there are any influences on you or are you, I'll say myself, I'd like to say I'm a C.S. Lewis Christian, who is not a theologian. He was an apologist, an interesting guy. But also, you know, I used to, and say, still do read Thomas Merton and some of the contemplative some. Oh, yeah. Right? And so anyway, what are some of the influences on your religious thinking, whether, you know, whether Deer Drive

theologians or more contemplative writers? Do you have a list? Well, I have a list information. I would obviously C.S. Lewis is there. And it's interesting that people, they, I've heard this kind of thinking people say, well, C.S. Lewis, I mean, you're not a theologian, obviously. And people always say things, well,

as if somehow that, well, he doesn't have a license to practice theology. like he's unlicensed um you know he just does it in his living room uh but c s louis has had i think more of a profound religious effect on people um i mean i think jr r tolken probably has too i mean i'm not really i mean i i struggle through those books they're not really my thing but uh you are talking about somebody who was deeply deeply committed to the story and to the timelessness of the story um I like, I mean, there's some Anglican ones that I can think are really interesting.

Stanley Haueras is pretty interesting. He's at, uh, in, um, uh, at Duke, I think. Duke, yeah. Yeah. And then, um, I like, uh, and then there's like the, the, the more recent Anglican writers are, um, Rowan, um, I, I always would say Rowan Atkinson. It's not, it's not Mr. Bean. Um, uh, I know, I don't hear me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just, I'm, like, went out of my head. Anybody who's trying, anybody who I think is thinking, Fleming Rutledge is an American, and she's written a wonderful book on, on, the crucifixion. So all these, all of this stuff is great. I also, I also love the, um, the historians with faith. So, you know, Tom Holland's dominion. Obviously, if you like, the rest of history

Tom Holland's dominion is really wonderful I think also there's a guy Jeffrey Criple who has written this book which is bananas by the way it's called how to think impossible and he it's a very interesting

very it's not dense but it's just like it's all over the place it's beautiful, it's funny and witty and smart and erudite but it's it's all over the place and there's a guy named Michael Edwards who is such an incredible showoff. He's an American.

I know he's an English guy who speaks French and occasionally writes in French, which is like, okay, get out of town as far as I'm concerned. But he wrote a wonderful book called The Poetry in the Bible or the – yeah, I think it's called Poetry in the Bible or something like that. And it's really, really brilliant and sweeping. And I like that. I also, by the way, I'm also like – I think Raven and Bratman.

Brown is great. I think N.T. Wright is great. Those are like more New Testament scholars. I just finished a paper, actually, just turned it on Friday that I used Raymond Brown and Boltonman together talking about John. Yeah, because I think they, I think they're right. I said this better the paper, but I think they're right about the storicity of it and how the text is, you know, what parts of the text work, what parts don't, what parts were should have shoved in and what parts weren't. But I don't think any of that matters because I think the story is fantastic, and the construction of the story is a masterpiece. The fact that whoever was the final redactor of that gospel took pieces and put them together that were kind of somewhere floating around, like the adulterous woman was a piece that was floating.

It was in Luke for their, you know, their manuscripts of Luke where it's there and took it and put it right where it belongs is kind of astonishing. Anyway, that was my theory. Yeah, so, by the way, I've heard of, I mean, some of these people I'm really like Tom Holland and N.T. write. I'm actually reading, Stanley Harwis has a memoir called Hannah's Child that I'm actually a third of the way through reading right now. Oh, yeah, he, I mean, his book of sermons, I don't know if they were all sermons or just essays, but it's really good. I mean, it's really good. I mean, look, there's some stuff in there and you're like, okay, I'm not, I'm not. Here's the phrase I usually use because I think it's the least incendiary.

I can easily, I can get a lot of value and meaning out of a lot of those writers without having to agree with them that the Paris Climate Accords would have saved the Earth. Of course, yeah, no, that's right. I can overlook that stuff too. Let me go back, though. We're just saying a prompt this question, which is, you talk about moving the story around to fit it in the right place. To what extent is your long experience as a script writer? as a person constructing shows. How does that help you understand these things,

but also is it, do, I don't know to say to your classmates notice that you have a, bring this different background and perspective to things? Yeah, because I'm, yeah, they notice everything I do because I'm so weird. I'm such a weirdo. So strange, this old man is here.

I, what I'm surprised about the story stuff is that you, and I, listen, I mean no disrespect to these brilliant scholars. They know more than, I do, and they certainly read the Greek, and I haven't. Sometimes I find them struggling with something that is obvious to me, because that's how you make a story work. So the awkward jump in John specifically about, like, okay, get all this theology, it's like high-flute language, and then there's, and then suddenly he's, you know, he's changing

of water to wine. and like well why is why in john does he go why is the temple scene where the overturning the tables why is that in the first act basically right that's like a and why like it's and people have all these reasons for it was like well in the story you want the the the story of the person I mean not to be Joseph Campbell about it but but actually you can be like you have to you have to you have to burn the boats you have to you have to there's no turning back it's that The first scene, he's turning over tables. That means the end is in motion.

And if you're constructing a story, that's where you want it. Now, the other synops, the other synoptics have it at the end, right? And that makes sense too, but that's just a different way to tell the story. And we have four Gospels for a reason. It's not so we get to pick one. That's because all are true. And that's also really hard. the

the the you know the what they go they call historical criticism or something where you're trying to figure out is this is this the Q source or the P source or all that stuff and I was in my

Old Testament and New Testament classes last semester that was a big part of trying to explain to people what how to wrap their head around teasing in one text who wrote what and I was like finally had to raise my hand and say this is what this is called a writer's guild credit arbitration committee and I've been on a million of them and what they do is they send you every every version of every script every version of that story every every outline every every draft that was ever written by and that with nobody's name on it and then the final draft and you've got to decide who gets the credit meaning who gets the money basically and unfortunately for the gospel writers and for the

certainly and for the Hebrew Bible scribes there's no money you know they're not going to get any money but it's not that unusual say oh yeah I see this bit comes from that like it makes it makes total sense to anybody in show business well I'm sure the idea must have occurred to you that your pitch meeting in your collar will be a sitcom of the writer's room for the four gospels no I mean I believe me I've thought of it. I figure you might have, right.

I want to ask more about that, but before we do, let's do one last thing from your present moment. You said you just preached your first sermon. So now, is that something all the students are expected to do as part of their course of study, or is it something you want to do? So tell us about and then tell us what you preached. Well, there's always a year. I think everyone has to do a year of working in a church. So you have an internship.

So I'm the world's oldest intern at the local Episcopal Church in Princeton, which is right on, basically on the campus. And so, you know, I go and I do little Bible study stuff when it comes up and I do morning and evening prayer when it comes up and I help lead a little Monday night conversation sometimes and I just fill in, you know, and then you got to preach. And so I think I got to preach next semester too. And this was the fourth, fourth Advent, no, sorry, third Advent, a third Sunday Advent, which is, you know, it's like, okay, waiting, waiting, waiting, patience, patience, patience, that's Advent, you know. And so that's kind of where I, I said it nicer, but that's kind of where I was, you know. And it was fun. It was like a, like it was fun.

But it wasn't, I mean, you know, it's not that different. You know, you got an audience and, you know, they, they have to be there, but they don't have to listen. And you got to grab them with something and you got to tell them something they haven't heard or something they've heard, but in a different way. And so it's really, it's the, I'm trying to explain this to the rector, like, about running a church and everything. It's like, you know, I've been on 501C3 boards, right? And I've also run TV shows. That's kind of what running at church is. Big sprawling thing where you don't, you think you have a lot of power, but you don't really.

And you kind of need all this consensus all the time. And everybody's staring at you. And, you know, a good, a major portion of it is just walking around like, you know, you know what you're doing. And he goes, yeah, that's exactly it. So it's not, you know, there are real similarities to, but I suspect that that is true for many people in many jobs. And I think if, you know, I'd say this to all my friends,

the people I meet who are my age or younger, some of them, they're like, oh, you know, I always kind of wanted to do that. And I'm like, do it. do it because the church your church needs you yeah whatever church that is so uh you know in politics i often remind people of you know ralald reagan saying i don't know how somebody could do this job as president and not be an actor right and and you know some of Winston Churchill's friends and many of his critics said Winston you missed your calling in life you should have been an actor right So, in other words, I argue that the most successful people on the global stage in politics

are people who have a good instinct, an ability to understand the dramatic or theatrical aspects of human life, especially political life. So, yeah, so, you know, some churches overdue the production, you know, like Robert Schuers, Crystal Cathedral, all that sort of leaves me very cold, but that's why I like liturgical worship. But what I'm trying to get closer to here is, well, use it as a transition to religious, in Hollywood. And there's two or three ways that can go. One is, are there many religious people in Hollywood? I think more interesting is the challenge of self-consciously making religiously themed

films. And you often hear especially conservative Christians saying, why can't we make movies about Bible stories? And sometimes people will try and they're really bad. Yeah. And C.S. Lewis used to say, don't concentrate on a self-consciously doing a religious message, do good art. And if it happens to incorporate, that's what works, right? So it's Narnia books, for example. Yeah, yeah, right. And then you can think of, there have been some religious movies over the years that have done extremely well. Ben Hur, maybe he's one of the great classics, right? Yeah, very. And then sort of out of nowhere, Mel Gibson does the Passion of the Christ, and it's this monster seller, right? A big box office hit and studios say, we're going to do something like that, and they try and they flop at it. And

so I don't know what the question here exactly is. You can see where I'm going with all this, religion is a special problem for Hollywood or what how do you make sense of all this? Well, I mean, you know, I think it's so many, so many complicated strands. I think one of them is that just even just culturally, ethnically, the, the scrappy entrepreneurs who built show business, Bill Hollywood were, you know, Eastern European Jews. And they felt, and legitimately, I think, they felt. like we better we better be careful because this is not a country that loves

juice that much and we are trying to do mass entertainment and most of the people have never met a Jew in this country and what they know of them they don't like right that's kind of what that's been around so they were very careful when they did old testament and New Testament stories and they did them very faithfully

and some of those are great you know the greatest story you ever told and at her or like some are great right there's great old movies but as that so that was one i think strain which i don't think you can deny i think that you have this other part of the idea that the people in in show business who are successful they kind of deep down know they're weird now that like there's something they move however they grew up wherever they grew up that it's weird now they're like they live in a different world and so all all the people who go to church in america and believe are just kind of strange to them and they kind of know it and they're it's not condescending it's just an

awareness that i these are people i can't really speak to because i've just you know i i've got a little person running behind me handing me tiny bottles of water uh whenever i want them um there's a great i don't know if you've seen the movie j kelly but in j kelly was a really good movie there's a kind of a weird running joke where j kelly was somebody says you just you could ever be alone and he goes i can be alone and then the minute he says that somebody his bodyguard hand said, you want to, here's a water for you. Thank you. And he gets, you know, and so I think there's that. I also feel like, I kind of feel like we've been running an experiment in America, definitely, but probably the world, the Western world general. What would happen? What would, what would a

generation look like in America that was raised almost entirely in a secular culture, not just in a culture that repudiates or ignores religion, but our culture that really has no connection to it at all. So culture that doesn't read the Bible, it doesn't know the story, that doesn't, even if it's to say it's all superstitious nonsense, doesn't even know, isn't atheistic. To be an atheist means you're rejecting something that you've looked at. What would that be like? To have a bunch of people who are now 60, I was born and in 1965, for whom it's not like they don't believe or they believed or they believed and they left or they, they just don't, they just don't have any mooring at all.

And I'm sort of obsessed with that cohort because I think that cohort is like 40, 50, 60 years old, maybe even older. And they have lived enough of a life to have felt things and to have experienced things that faith is talks about that faith addresses and I think there are a lot of people my age and a little bit younger who are like what what has this all been about and where do I go

to to think about this stuff so I mean that's a long way to question a long way to answer to a question but so I think that that's the third part which is that the culture in general just kind of I mean if you were going to make a first of all the Hebrew Bible is

I mean, it's crazy. It hasn't been made it. It's Game of Thrones. Yeah. Right. I mean, and there are parts of it that you like, even the producer of the Game of Thrones would say, well, that that's just too violent. We're not doing that.

So I don't, I just think it's a, it is no longer people were afraid of it. They're afraid of offending you. They bring it up. They're afraid of, I think, a whole bunch of different things. And like, so why, if you're a show business, you always take the easy way out. Why? Why poke the bear? You know? Like, just to, we'll just talk about something else. And I think the culture helped them do that. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you're familiar with, well, put it this way, it's astounding how many, what used to be household or, you know,

common cultural expressions derived from the Bible and Shakespeare, you know, phrases we use right. And to the extent that we've now neglected both the Bible and Shakespeare, you'll bring up some reference and people say, what? What is that? Or some of the Shakespeare phrases are still commonplace, but people don't know that it comes from Shakespeare, right? So, you know, I've long said that you really just need to know three, not three authors, exactly, but three books. Aristotle, the Bible and Shakespeare, and you'll be fine in life, right? Yeah, I mean, actually, that's true, actually, I think. Yeah. Yeah, right. Well, this has been fine. I can talk forever, but we don't want to tax the patients of our listeners. So one last question, I think,

I think, although I should ask, anything I haven't asked you that I should have or something else that you think listeners should know about a theological and spiritual excursion you're making? I think we covered all the heresies. You know, that is something that happens. Like, you know, I'm in a Bible study on Tuesday mornings and I do this other thing called EFM.

And there's sometimes people like, wait, am I allowed to say this or that? or like, and then every down and then it elapsed into what would technically be considered a heresy. But I actually feel like at this point, heresies are, it's a high class problem to have. It means we're talking. It means we're talking about it. It means it's part of the conversation. So I say bring on the heresies.

Yeah, well, we don't kill each other for them anymore as much as we used to. No, not as much as we used to. Right, right, right, yeah. So last question on a completely different subject, but it's on everybody's mind right now. and you seems like you've known or met everybody in Hollywood did you know Rob Reiner

much at all and I mean this is such an awful story but it's a terrible story you know I didn't I didn't know him really I met him a couple times and a lovely lovely guy and then there was a period a few years ago

it's like I do this thing that I that people do I think when a friend of theirs dies and it wasn't I'm not saying he's a friend of mine but you go into your email archives and you read your last exchanges and um and i remember doing that when pg o'clock died like just having going back and saying okay what was our you know yeah and there well i you know and so uh he and i rob reiner and i were like a part of a little group and we were trying he he really wanted to do

a tv comedy that touched on the kind of all in the family style Not a reboot, but like, okay, what did all the family do? It brought all of these things that people are arguing about in the home and I put them on screen. And he, you know, he's a very thoughtful guy. And he knew that the strength of all in the family was that the hero was Archie Bunker. And the hero was Archie Bunker because he's the one with a job, right? And he fought in the war and had two jobs, right?

And it was like paying for all the food, right? doing everything and he kind of and I think he wanted to do it right and so we were talking about it back and forth about what would be like and what we what we have to talk about and you know he was extremely um he was extremely sensitive to the idea that there were things that the people who run the networks and and all those things that they were afraid of talking about and there were opinions they just were afraid of most almost entirely on the right uh that he just didn't want that. He wanted to make sure that we went forward with this,

that I knew that he was going to fight for all of that, the full truth of the conversation to unfold because that's the only way all in the family would be. And I think that, I admired that. I really admired that. And I know he was a partisan. I mean, you know, that's what he was. But, man, he made some great movies.

And he was a, in my exchanges with him, he was a really lovely thoughtful guy. And I think it's a real tragedy that, I mean, it's just one of those horrible, horrible, horrible stories. You just, you know, I think I made the decision maybe last week or whatever, like, within two days that, you know what, I knew. I know enough about it. I don't need to know anymore. I just skip by those stories.

I'm not, I just don't want to know about it. Yeah, that's right. Well, let's not end on a total down note like that, but I have felt like I had to ask. It's an important, it's an important story, I think. Yeah, I think so. And so instead, let me just then send us out saying, God bless you, Rob, Merry Christmas. And Merry Christmas is you, too. Yeah, and Happy New Year.

And we'll have to do this again after you're at the halfway point. We'll have to do this again at the end of year three and see where you're heading next. See if I'm like, yeah, it's all, I realize it's all crazy. I'm a Hindu now. I'm practicing Buddhism. I'll say that you know you're around fussy Anglicans, which is pretty much a redundant. I understand. But I have my, you know, we big jokes in a seminary about what your ministry is.

And people go like, I, my ministry is, you know, making sure that people, you only use one font in their, you know, presentations. And my ministry is to sort of scrape some of the fussiness off of the Episcopal Church. And one of them is like they, you say Merry Christmas to a fussy end. Oh, you mean Happy Advent? Because you know, it's not Christmas. Like, oh, give me a break. Merry Christmas. And I'm going to sing a Christmas Carol now, too, just to.

drive you crazy yeah well thanks we'll see you soon i hope hey very christmas So, I'm going to be the I'm going to I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm going to be I'm going to

I'm on the I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm I'm We're going to be able to be. Thank you.