Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #284: David Dault - Producer and Host of Things Not Seen

Have you ever thought to yourself, "Man, I'd like to host my own podcast"? Well, guess what? You can go to podbean.com/voices and get everything you need to create, manage, and promote your podcast. I use Podbean every week for Voices in My Head. There's easy uploading and publishing tools, stunning templates, custom domains, social and promotional tools, an embeddable podcast player, monetization tools, and more. It is your all-in-one podcasting solution. With Podbean, you can create professional podcasts in minutes without any programming knowledge. Best of all, everything is mobile ready right from the start. So go to podbean.com/voices, and when you sign up, use the code "voices" and you'll get a sizable discount. Podbean, for your home podcasting. Thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer-songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host Rick Lee James, and today is a very special privilege for me because I am recording on location in Chicago, Illinois at the Lutheran School of Theology. Did I, did I say that right? Is it okay? Lutheran School of Theology. And I'm here with my friend David Dalt. David is a very interesting man who hosts one of my favorite podcasts, Things Not Seen. It's not just a podcast like most of us put out, it actually gets onto some radio stations from time to time. So we have WYLL-AM 1160 here in Chicago that airs your show. There's also the Public Radio Exchange, so that means at times there are NPR stations, um, places like Cleveland that will air your show. And I'm sitting in the studio for Things Not Seen right now with David, and it's just one of my great privileges. So David Dalt, welcome to Voices in My Head.

I'm a fan of the show and I'm happy to be here. Thank you, Rick.

Well, thank you. This is so cool for me because I never get to like be in someone else's studio to record, and my listeners today are gonna go like, whoa, Rick must have really upgraded his sound. But the fact is, I'm— you have upgraded my sound today. So I'm so grateful to be recording here in the TNS studio. Today it's gonna be about you. I have had the privilege of listening to your show for a while and I know that you are a student, an actual student who studied under Walter Brueggemann, one of my great theological heroes. You're an author. You've been working, writing feverishly, it seems. Every time I see a post by you— not every time, but often— you'll say, "I wrote X many words today," which is such a profound discipline, you know, and I love that you are so dedicated to your work in doing that. You have this wonderful show that talks about faith and religion and really things that stretch the bounds sometimes, uh, of religious conversation called Things Not Seen. And it's been my pleasure to be on your show a couple of times, but today is about you and to kind of talk about who you are and the journey that you've taken. And I couldn't be happier to be here today. So let's start right here. You got your start in journalism when you were 16 years old, writing articles for your hometown newspaper. Tell us just a little bit about that, because I, I, I'd love to hear how a 16-year-old kid already started doing journalism.

Well, I, I grew up at a time when, I guess, there was a kind of a resurgence in the notion that journalism could make a difference in society. And one of the things that happened to me was when I was, I guess, in 4th and 5th grade, so around 10 years old, my mother, who had been an architect, got a job as an advertising designer. And so she would make the big full-page ads for like car dealerships down in the town where I was growing up in Columbus, Georgia. And this was just the time when car dealerships were starting to become kind of mega dealerships in multiple cities. And one of the first One of the first ones that did that was an organization called Bill Hurd Chevrolet, and Bill Hurd ended up being in, I think, 5 states by the time the empire was at its fullest, and she was just on the ground floor of starting to create advertisement for the local paper, but also now for these other papers in these other cities as the dealership was expanding. But what that means, if you're a designer, it means at the time that you're literally cutting Rubylith, which is a type of material that is photo-opaque, so it looks black when you photograph it for the paper, and she would design things using layout type and Rubylith and little pictures of cars. But in order to do that, she used, and she worked with others who used the newspaper facilities, but they couldn't use the newspaper facilities during the normal hours, and so she would go in at around 10 at night and would work until 2 or 3 in the morning. And because she was a solo parent, that means that sometimes I, at 10 or 11 years old, was going in and I was being there at 10 at night and usually sleeping at some point, but staying until 2 or 3 in the morning, and then we'd come home. And so I got the run of the place, and I got the chance to look at all the newsrooms, and I got the chance to go back and look at the places where they would lay out the newspaper using heated wax and the huge cameras. And then every once in a while you'd hear, at about 1 in the morning, you'd hear the rumble as the newspaper presses would start in the back of the building and the entire building would shake. And so I would really think that as a child, newspaper writing and the whole, the whole environment of the newspaper got into my blood. And then when I was older in high school, the local newspaper, the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer, was really trying to do this kind of activist journalism and it was under a man by the name of Jack Swift, who some listeners may or may not have ever heard of, but he was a real pioneer in this notion of urban journalism and trying to use the newspaper to help make the entire civic structure better. And so Jack Swift, for adults, would be getting together people to talk about race, and this was in the late '70s and early '80s, and he'd be talking about all the problems that were there in the South and all the things that we still weren't talking about. He was using his status as an editor at the newspaper to try and bring these conversations together. But then he also decided that he wanted to open up the newspaper and let high schoolers start to write for the paper too. And so I was one of the— in sort of the inaugural class of this group that started writing for a section of the paper called Teen Tempo. And so I would go and I would be like a cub reporter and I would go and I would research things and I'd talk to people at the mall and I'd talk to people at my school and I'd talk to people people at restaurants and I'd ask them questions and then I'd come back and I'd write it up and we'd put it into the paper and every once in a while it would get picked up and put out there. That was important to me both because it was the first time that I got a chance to really kind of write for other people to read it and we'll get into this more. It was also my first encounter with a crippling fear of writing because that was the first time that I really encountered writer's block. It's like, oh, I've got all these things to say and I have no idea how to say them. And it was really one of my formative memories is going to Jack Swift, the editor and just pouring my heart out saying, "I can't," and him literally sitting down with me and having me talk through the ideas and show me how to build the ideas into something that could be read by others. And it was a very, very prosaic process. It's, you set things up in a structure for a newspaper and when writing gets hard for me, I find myself going back to that lesson and I really, I try and write in a very simple way. I don't try and make it flowery. I try and just I try and stick to the fact, the most important fact first and get to the least important fact, and by the time that you're done, you've got a piece. That was a long answer, but that's— No, it's great. I mean, a lot of my life is tied up in my memories of being a 10-year-old listening to the presses rumble and then being a 16-year-old sitting with Jack Swift, watching him take my ideas and show me how to actually make them something that people would want to read.

That's so cool, but I can definitely see that background though, like even what you do today, just in the way that you ask questions and trying to figure out what the— you ask some of the best questions, uh, not only for me but the other guests that I've heard on your show. And, um, you know, was that your aspiration to be a journalist whenever you were a kid? Or— because I know you went to, um, to Vanderbilt. I didn't realize you had been in Nashville and Vanderbilt.

So I, I went— I grew up in Columbus, Georgia, which is, uh, about 100 miles south of Atlanta, and I like to call it the rust on the buckle of the Bible Belt. It was a very backwards-looking city when I lived there. It's gotten better since, in the 30 years or so since I've not been there. But then I went from there to a little school in Tennessee called Suwannee for my undergraduate, and then I went on many years later and did a master's degree at Columbia Theological Seminary. That's where I worked with Walter Berggrueman. And then I went from there and did a second master's and a PhD at Vanderbilt. So I spent about, I guess all told, about 8 or 9 years in Nashville, and from about, I guess, from about 2002 to 2009. But I lived in Tennessee off and on for the better part of 15 years.

Wow. Have you been back to Nashville lately?

No, not probably, not for about 10 years.

Wow. I was there a few weeks ago, and it's, it's kinda like LA now. It's just growing so fast. Wow. The traffic is terrible, but you know, I still love it, but man, it's a different Different kind of city for sure. Well, that's neat to have that connection because I didn't realize until today you had been even at Vanderbilt. I want to talk a little bit about your time at Columbia, partially because of our now mutual friend Walter Brueggemann, who from time to time I go have breakfast with or we'll do a podcast. And I have just found him to be such a warm person and, and I've I've learned a lot from him over the years from reading him, a few seminars that I've been to with him, but I have really grown to love him as a person. And tell us a little bit about just your time there with him and maybe some other professors that had some real influence on you. And I'm most interested, I think, in maybe how that shaped the direction that you took from Columbia on and maybe how you felt that leading into where you are now?

Well, let me start way back and say that the same mother that I talked about a moment ago who raised me and took me to the newspaper, my mother was a very virulent, very strongly willed atheist, and so I was raised without a faith tradition. And I went as an atheist to Suwannee, which was an Episcopal school there in the center of Tennessee, and had some awakening experiences there that made me realize and get in touch with something, let's call it theism, and from there I became a Quaker. So I was a member of the Religious Society of Friends, which is a sort of a fringe church on the side of sort of mainline Christianity, traditionally a peace church, it's known as, so radical pacifists and radical egalitarians, and so I spent 15 years in various Quaker meetings of various stripes and in the process of this graduated and moved to Atlanta, still was not identifying as a Christian but was identifying at least as a believer of something. And in the midst of all of this, I'm really kind of pressing the accordion together right now, but let's just say I had a series of events that happened in my mid-20s that both awakened me to the realization that I was hungry not just for a general deity, but I was actually connecting with the story of Jesus Christ. And in the midst of that, I had a moment where I got a chance to go back out to California for a meeting, and California is where I was born, and I was in the midst of this kind of awakening of desire for a relationship with Jesus Christ, and I felt like Jesus and God, that God had brought me back out to California, the place where I was born, as kind of a rebirth, and so I was wearing a cross at the time, I dipped I threw up my cross in the Pacific Ocean and I said, "I'm yours, God, and do with me whatever you will and I'll go wherever you want me to go," and whatever. And you never, ever, ever want to say that because within 6 months the woman that I thought that I was going to marry had dumped me. I lost my job. I had a nervous breakdown. And the way that I describe that experience now is that it was like you were on a train that was going really, really fast in one direction and you said, "Okay, God, take me wherever you'll go." pick that train up and set it on a new track and all the momentum that you had, if you've ever been on a train, you know this, as a train stops, it kind of slams you forward. Well, all of that just slammed me against the wall and now the train was on a new track. And as I was picking up the pieces in the months after that, really a very crippling depression and really no idea what I was going to do now. Everything that I had thought was the trajectory of my life was gone. And I lucked into being associated with a youth group, and this group of teenagers there at Columbia Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia really kind of loved me back into being a solid human being. I really owe them a lot, and I'm still in touch with many of the kids that were there at that time, and they accepted me in my brokenness, they identified with my brokenness, and they allowed me to be who I was, which was I was a wreck, but the staff and the other youth ministers were good mentors, and so I was really shown kind of the— you've used a quote from Saint Francis, "Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words." Well, I was really shown the love of God through these young people in a way that was very powerful. In the process of that, as I began to kind of get my life back together, I looked across the street and realized that across the street from this church there were some tennis courts and I said, "Well, I wonder what's on the other side of these tennis courts." It turns out what's on the other side of these tennis courts was Columbia Theological Seminary. I hadn't done super well in college and I had been discouraged from going to graduate school, but I found that I had a hunger now to learn more about the faith that I had kind of come into and that probably the best way to do it would be to maybe go and take some classes. And so I said, well, if I'm ever going to get let into graduate school, all of the kids of the professors are in my youth group and they probably like me enough that even though I was a terrible student, they might let me in. And so they let me in and I found, to my surprise, and I think probably to the surprise of my undergraduate professors, that I was actually a really good student.

Mm.

And so even though I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate with a 2.6 average, I graduated from Columbia with close to a 4.0.

Wow.

And really, really loved theology especially. And so spent my life at Columbia kind of discerning what the next step was, and it became clear to me that what I wanted to do was go on for more education and maybe be a professor. But along the way, I had the chance to work with some really stellar amazing professors, in particular a man by the name of Ron Cram, who was a person that did religious education, who was a person that was probably the closest that I've ever found to someone who embodied the kind of vibe that I think Fred Rogers put out. Just as a professor and the entire way that he carried himself was pacific, and I mean that in terms of it really was, you felt more peaceful when you were around him. He was very gentle, but he was also just incredibly incisive in the way that he would look at problems problems and he would analyze them down to their kind of roots and in analyzing them down to their roots sometimes he would find the danger in an idea and he would help to show that to you and sometimes he'd find a joy that was unearthed in that idea. But then because I like theology, I worked a lot with a man by the name of George Straup and I loved George because he was unapologetically Reformed and for your listeners who don't know about this divide, The Reformed tradition is its own thing. It's got some ideas about the sovereignty of God and that messes up everything else because it just becomes such a dense structure, the sovereignty of God, that every other theological idea gets bent towards it. And so I got a chance to begin to learn about the Reformed tradition through George Straup and then because of the connections that Columbia had to some other institutions, I also got a chance to work under a man by the name of Eberhard Busch who was the last the last student and secretary, and he was the biographer of a theologian by the name of Karl Barth. And so my lineage is very strongly Barthian and really shaped by the Barthian tradition. Well, I'm glad that— some people throw tomatoes when I say that, but I find that I'm still drawing on the Barthian tradition even today. And in fact, in some of the stuff that I'm writing, I'm going back to some essays that I encountered in seminary.

Well, if I can interrupt you for one moment, a lot of my listeners will know that certain times of of year, I will just take the podcast time to read sermons from Karl Barth and say, "Today we're going to look at a Barth sermon." So, and several of them have had interest in that, so that's great.

Well, and so I was in seminary as a Quaker during the 9/11 attacks.

Mm.

And so I had some interesting moments in seminary having to experience— not having to, but experiencing some intersectionality, and let me explain what I mean. So one of the things that happened was, this was also during the time when the Presbyterian Church, it was a Presbyterian seminary, when the PCUSA was going through one of its many controversies around ordination, particularly ordination of same-sex attracted persons, but also to some extent there was still some pushback against the ordination of women. There were people that were classmates that I dearly loved who were in the struggle because they felt called and the church in some way was saying, "We don't sense your call." And so for me, the Quaker tradition is a non-ordaining tradition and so for me it was an interesting witness to be at a seminary and to be able to say both in writing but also in my presence and sometimes in conversation, "I'm a white straight male." because at the time I was identifying as a white straight male. I'm a white straight male who can't be ordained, which makes me an anomaly in your tradition. But you need to know that there are those of us who may feel the calling, but also because we've got all the right markers, you know, straight presenting, cis presenting, male presenting, white presenting, all of those things that would make me a good golden boy in the PCUSA tradition, and yet because of the way that I was oriented to the gospel, I was not able to be ordained, and I was able to stand among them as a witness in solidarity with those that also maybe felt the calling of ministry and were not able to be ordained. I hope that that was helpful to my colleagues there. It was profoundly shaping for me.

Sure.

And as I'm now Roman Catholic, I'm still a person who is presenting in those various registers, but I still can't be ordained because I'm married. There's a lot there. I skipped ahead there, but there's a lot there.

That's fine.

But then, you know, this also happened, you know, I happened to be a Quaker, a pacifist, at a time when we were under attack and the response to that attack was, "Well, we're going to go now and we're going to fight a country that didn't attack us," you know, and then we're going to fight the country that supposedly did attack us. And so being there in that moment was also a profound chance to be a witness as well. The most profound memory that I have, and this gets to the core of your question, was the morning that we were attacked, or perhaps it was the day immediately after, we were in an Old Testament theology class with Walter Berggrueman, and we were there, the class was focused on the book of Isaiah, but in that moment Walter Berggrueman chose instead to take us on a survey of the various books that spoke to the condition of the moment, and the thing, and I've got friends like Jonathan Kaplan and others that are now in the pastorate that also recall this and I've recalled this moment with him where he— and I don't know, I'm sad to say I don't know the exact citation. It may be in Jeremiah, it may be in one of the other books, but basically it's saying, "If you do not do justice and righteousness, I, the Lord Yahweh, I will plow your cities like fields." and he was tying it back together. He said, you know, right now we're in the midst of a moment when our city has been plowed like a field, and that's not a call to vengeance, that's a call to repentance. That's, you know, that's a moment when God is saying, this is a result of policies that you have been enacting against the poor and the least of these among us. What can we learn from this moment? And what we shouldn't learn from this moment is to trust the sword and the horses of Pharaoh, We shouldn't— that's a little Isaiah there— we should instead be trusting God. And I mean, talk about a formative experience. That was profound for me. The reason why I was in that class, because I was a theology major, not an Old Testament major in my graduate studies, and I had been working with George Straub, and I had thought to myself on my trajectory, I'm going to write my master's thesis under George Straub. And then one day I was at coffee and I sat down with George and I said, George, Dr. Straub, I'm planning next semester to start writing my master's thesis with you. I'd love to talk to you about that. He goes, oh, I'm going to be on sabbatical for an entire year. And so I was not going to have the opportunity to work with George Straub. And we thought about it and we were like, what can we do? And George said, well, you should work instead with my good friend Walter Bergerman. And so that that began my relationship with Walter, and that relationship was formative in so many ways, both in terms of his— the care that he took in, you know, I was an unknown to him, and so I took his Old Testament theology class, which blew me away. I took his Isaiah class, which blew me away. But then also in working with him on my master's thesis, he took the interests that I had and he laughs sometimes when I tell this story because we had decided that we were going to work together on a real bright point for him, an Old Testament theologian by the name of Gerhard von Rad. And we had figured out what we were going to do and I had gone and I had gotten the books and I had started to do the research and then I get this note in my mailbox in the post office on campus and if you've ever— you've talked to Walter and you know he's got a certain style of talk but if you If you've ever seen the handwriting of the man, I mean, there are doctors who have died and been resurrected and still don't have handwriting as poor as this. And so it's a lost art just deciphering Walter's handwriting. But this note, which I still have, and I'm going to read it in his voice. David, I've been thinking about your project. It occurs to me your proper work is in Rosenzweig. Gah! We'll talk about it. And it turns out the man was exactly right. So Franz Rosenzweig was a Jewish contemporary of Martin Buber and a philosopher who lived after the First World War but died before the Second World War but who was profoundly influential on the entirety of 20th century philosophy including Emmanuel Levinas and many others who came after and particularly in the Jewish tradition Franz Rosenzweig is an important touchstone for a group of people that I was very interested in out of the University of Virginia that did a school of thought called Scriptural Reasoning which brings together Muslims and Jews and Christians to read common texts together and to build relationships in their difference across that common text and Rosenzweig ended up being a touchstone for them too. So what Walter Bergman managed to do was in the few conversations that he had with me in the process of getting ready for this project, he managed to find the one thing that I didn't know about that was aligned with all of my interests that he did know about that would project me and prepare me for everything that I did for the next 20 years. Brilliant move on his part. I mean, I would have loved to have written about, you know, Gerhard von Rad. Would have learned a lot from that, but I learned a lot more from being thrown into the deep end with Rosenzweig, and still I'm mining the benefits of that. 20 years later.

So he had a lot of wisdom in even helping you discern.

Well, and maybe there was some Holy Spirit there too. But either way, I credit him with being the kind of scholar who would take the time to figure that out. And that I think speaks to really why my friendship with him has been so strong and why I feel such a debt to him and why Whenever I have the chance to be with him, I always pay for his dinner.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, because I just— I've been profoundly shaped by him and he's become a good friend and we've worked on some projects together and are continuing to.

That's great, man. I love his laugh too. I just— it's just so fun to laugh with him. And I was— I remember the first time that I met him and I was— I'm always a little worried when meeting like famous theologians because you never know if they're going to be kind of stodgy or, you know, whatever.

Some of them are.

And some of them are, and he just was the complete opposite of that. Just such a welcoming person and truly embodies the things he talks about, I think.

Very gracious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, so you've been living in Chicago now for a while, just to fast forward a little bit. And I know from your bio that you moved to Chicago with your family in 2013, and you spent 5 years— actually, the last time I was here with you was at the Saturday evening Club Chicago Sunday Evening Club. Chicago— sorry, did I say Saturday? You did.

Chicago Sunday Evening Club.

I've been at a retreat for a few days and I'm tired. Um, but yes, the Sunday Evening Club. And so there you were working with, uh, Faith Focus Media for television and radio and the web. Uh, and that's really, I believe, where your podcast started from, wasn't it? Or was it even before that?

Well, so let me, let me go back by going through the Sunday Evening Club.

Okay, sure.

The Sunday Evening Club was a pioneer in religious broadcasting. If you ever wondered why The 700 Club and the PTL Club call themselves club, they stole it from the Chicago Sunday Evening Club.

Is that right?

It was formed in 1908. It was a live event at Orchestra Hall down on Michigan Avenue where, you know, thousands of people would come because after the Chicago fire they didn't rebuild the churches in the Loop. And so this became the main— the Sunday Evening Club live event became the main religious service in central Chicago for a number of years and, you know, famous, famous preachers. So the entire roster of mainline heavyweights came through including 6 times Martin Luther King Jr. came and preached at the Sunday Evening Club. But, you know, as soon as radio was a thing, they started broadcasting radio from Orchestra Hall and then in the late 1950s, television became a thing and they started broadcasting television from Orchestra Hall, and unfortunately the television production at the time in this big cavernous theater was not very good because they couldn't get the lighting bright enough and everything. And so eventually they moved from being a live face-to-face event with thousands of people to being a studio-produced event that had 30 people in a sort of mock audience, and they tried to keep some of the same things, but what happened was a lot of the televangelists like The 700 Club, like the PTL Club, They took this idea and they saw the power of what the Sunday Evening Club was doing, but they used much more slick production values and they used the studio much more effectively. And so very quickly the Sunday Evening Club became sort of eclipsed by these other rising stars in the late '60s and early '70s. And also I think they were eclipsed because the Sunday Evening Club was never willing to be as strongly to the right They really wanted to stay mainline and they really wanted to be a welcoming place for all the citizens of Chicago. And to do that, that meant that you had to be open to a neutrality that some of these others weren't willing to do. Sure. And as a result of that, they kind of got left behind. And so part of my job when I came here in 2013 was to help to revitalize some of the programming of the Sunday Evening Club and to think about what new media might look like for the 21st century. And, you know, I still think that that is a noble cause for organizations like the Sunday Evening Club, but also organizations like the Sunday Evening Club became so wedded to the idea of television that it's very hard for them to understand or even to have the strength to find, for the journey to find new audiences. You know, the, Sometimes organizations like that, and I'm not just speaking about the Sunday Evening Club now, but I'm speaking about other legacy organizations.

Sure.

You know, new media— let's say it's an organization whose mission is to make sure that the Bible gets into everyone's hands, like one of the Bible societies, and there are many of them.

Sure.

Yeah. Well, now the Bible is in everyone's hands. You know, they can literally download it on their smartphone. And so all of these organizations, in the wake of new media and in the wake of the way that new media has made people able to access information. They've had to rethink their model and they struggle with that and I helped, I hope I helped with the Sunday Evening Club with that for about 5 years and as they're continuing to struggle with that question, they have good leadership and I'm hoping that they continue to take that question into the 21st century because I really feel that the legacy there is incredibly strong and again, just the access in their archives to the history of mainline preaching is unparalleled by any other organization in America. But I, I, I have been an independent producer for the past 2 years and have continued to be able to build relationships, you know, coming out of that trajectory with the Sunday Evening Club. I've now continued to build relationships on a national level with organizations like Sojourners and Commonweal and, and Freedom Road and just some really wonderful organizations here in Chicago. Okay, so that's Let me now back up. Things Not Seen got started actually in Memphis in 2012 when I was a professor of religion at Christian Brothers University, and it came with me to the Sunday Evening Club. Okay. And it was my intellectual property when it came to the Sunday Evening Club, and we co-produced it out of the Sunday Evening Club for a while because, again, it was a great example of this new media.

Sure.

You know, because it was a hybrid of an old model broadcast and a new model podcast. And we were trying to do that same thing with the television pieces as well. And so we were using that as, here, it's got a brand, it's got an audience, let's use this as one peg to hang the tent on.

Sure.

And then let's find other pegs and let's build other pegs. And so when I left the Sunday Evening Club, Things Not Seen came with me and continues to this day. It's been an interesting journey and I've learned a lot that I now use in my consulting business to help other people to figure out things like intellectual property and something like Voices in My Head, you, I imagine, own that outright. You own the name and you've got the trademark and all of that. Well, some people, if they don't bother to do those things, those properties, those ideas can become jeopardized when other people say, oh, this is good and here's a really fast way to get an audience. I'll steal the name.

Mm.

And early on with Things Not Seen, there was a virulent anti-Muslim organization that decided that they were going to start their own podcast called Things Not Seen. And so luckily I had the intellectual property in place and my lawyer wrote a very kind but sternly worded letter and we shut that down. But I mean, those are the kinds of things that I work on now, is trying to help people who have good ideas protect those ideas and get them out into the world.

That's great.

Yeah.

Well, and so I've been in both studios now and I'm always amazed at your audio quality.

Studio is such a generous term.

You know what though, you're talking to a musician who records in home studios, which are sometimes not even as big as this office, you know, at times when you go in. So in the age we live in, studios— I mean, honestly, your phone can be your studio to an extent, and that has been mine from time to time. So it's very interesting. But yours is, is great. The audio is always so good. But not only the audio quality, I want to talk about some of the guests that you've had. Sure. And I— and we may not be able to talk about a ton of them with the time we have, but I have a couple of favorite episodes. One in particular, my favorite, was when Jim Wallace was just coming out. It's been a few years ago now, but he had the book America's Original Sin, and you interviewed Jim Wallace from Sojourners. And that was one of my favorites, just to get to hear his perspective on things. There's still a few quotes from that show that I'll use from time to time that Jim said, but I'd love to hear from you Um, first of all, tell us some things that, just in case any of my listeners are unfamiliar with your show, um, I'm going to assume all of my listeners have heard every episode of mine, so they've heard the ones that I've been on your show. But, um, but for someone who's new to it, explain sort of the premise of the show and then get into us some of your favorite moments with guests. I'd love to hear about that.

I appreciate the opportunity to talk about my work. Thank you. Um, so Things Not Seen is born of a couple of moments. There's from many years ago now, I think 2011, from a publication called National Catholic Reporter. They did an article called NPR: Not Particularly Religious, and they talked about the frustration that a lot of NPR listeners had at the way that NPR, National Public Radio, covered religion. And they either covered it as this kind of boutique weird oddity or they covered it in a completely anthropological way, but they seemed to have no ability to take a person who actually was just speaking about faith as a central part of their life and an animating force of their life and just to take that seriously at face value. You know, they always seem to need to find some kind of cutesy angle on it and this— I read this article when I was a professor and it stuck with me. And I was very— I thought about it and was thinking about, you know, so there's an audience that listens to NPR and is interested in NPR-style shows that is frustrated in the way that NPR creates programming. OK. And then a few years later, I was listening to an interview on an NPR program called Fresh Air. And Terry Gross was interviewing an anthropologist by the name of T.D. Lerman, Tanya Lerman. And Tanya Luhrmann had just published a book called Coffee with Jesus. And she was— her fieldwork was going to evangelicals who took seriously the idea of making space in your day for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And so they would literally sometimes set out a cup of coffee and they would have coffee with Jesus, imaginatively having this conversation and telling Jesus about their day and being open to Jesus kind of giving them insight and whatever. And I mean, I have the utmost respect for T.D. Lerman's work on this project because of the way that she approached her subjects.

Mm-hmm.

OK, she did it the way that I would want her to do it. In the course of this interview, and I've gone back and listened to this moment many times, and I'm not going to completely quote it, but I will paraphrase it in very much the spirit in which it was said. Terry Gross says to T.D. Lerman, you know, sometimes when little children are growing up, they have imaginary friends. And at some point you need to say to them, "Your friend is not real." Didn't you feel a responsibility to say that to your interview subjects? To tell them that their imaginary friend isn't real?

Hmm.

And at that moment, I can pretty much say that the idea for how Things Not Seen should approach everything that we do was born. I wanted to create— and if you think about a a show that is on NPR called On Being. On Being started out on NPR as a very different show called Speaking of Faith, and over time the producers and the main person on that show have made the decision to stop speaking of faith and instead to kind of speak in a kind of kumbaya way, in the notion that we're all kind of spiritual, man, and we're going to ask questions about that core of mysticism that animates us all. And for listeners who can't see me, I'm literally rolling my eyes right now.

Kind of like faith without religion.

Yeah, yeah. So I want things not seen to fit into the hole that is left between the biased antagonism of something like fresh air and the kind of vapid, empty spirituality. And I'm saying that with, you know, in a technical sense. Of a program like On Being, and that's the hole that we're designed to fit into. We're producing with the same production values and audio quality of an NPR show and with the same ideas about how we're approaching our subjects as the NPR shows in terms of what, you know, we're not an evangelical show, we're not gonna do altar calls, we're not gonna ask people to, you know, send in and get a piece of the true cross for your donation or anything like that. You know, we're not that kind of show.. We're much more like an NPR show, but we're an NPR show that takes faith central and seriously. And the notion that what animates you as a Christian and what animates me as a Christian may be vastly different and that that difference is interesting and should be talked about in its detail and in its particularity. And so the— Nick Adams, who's an old colleague from Scriptural Reasoning, has a phrase that we learn in our process to disagree better and to make those disagreements public. That's really what Things Not Seen is trying to do. We're trying to learn how— I'm trying to model how to disagree better with people and how to make those disagreements public so that others can learn from them. But also, you know, in the process of iron sharpening iron, my faith becomes more central and more strong as it comes into hospitable contact with the faith of others. And so, you know, examples of that would be like a guest like Nancy Ellen Abrams who wrote a book called The God Who Could Be Real and her idea is much more like what you would have encountered in the '70s like the coming of the cosmic Christ. Like she wants to imagine not a God who is talked about in the Christian scriptures but rather a God who fits well with the ideas of physics and what kind of God could that be. And so in the course of our conversation we managed to be talking about her children and my children and I talked about about the Virgin Mary, and she goes, oh, you don't teach your children that kind of stuff, do you? I said, I absolutely do. Blessed Virgin Mary is very important in our household. But those kind of, I mean, those kind of moments where, where we actually unearth the, oh, you don't believe this and I do, you know, that to me is, is fascinating. The guests that really touch my heart though are the guests who, who allow me to discover something that I hadn't expected going into the interview. And so there are oftentimes, you know, those kinds of moments where I have expected the interview to be about one thing and it has ended up being about another. You know, and those moments are fantastic. And I'll be honest with you, I like those moments more sometimes than the moments that I get with people like Jim Wallace. No patch on Jim Wallace. I'm very thankful to be able to get nationally direct guests like Jim Wallace and Stanley Hauerwas and others. But what I find is oftentimes they— John Shelby Spong is a great example. It's been so long that I would have said, if you had met the young me, I just wish I could sit down for an hour with John Shelby Spong because there are questions I'd love to ask him. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to ask those questions because he's so full of knowledge and so good at what he does and he's done so many interviews that you ask him one question and he just goes. And oftentimes you find that the higher-level guests— and you probably encounter this too— the higher-level guests come well-prepared and they're almost impervious to real human moments.

Yeah.

And it's the nature of the business. But I really prefer the moments when we can find real human contact.

Yeah.

And in fact, you know, in the conversations that you and I have had, you have been willing to be very vulnerable with me, and you've risked with me in those moments. And when you do that, you're, you're epitomizing what I want out of a guest. You know, you're creating a moment where there's real vulnerability that they may not hear— listeners may not hear anywhere else with this particular person, or vulnerable in a different way. And that to me is the real animating love that I have for this, is getting a chance to have those connections with people.

I know what you mean. And I had— I don't know if you're familiar with— not that I want to make this about me, but it just goes along with what you're saying. The actor Stephen Tobolowsky, who, you know, played Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day, and he wrote a book about sort of his return to Judaism. And it was wonderful to have him on my show because, unexpected to me, I mean, we were both getting teary throughout the interview because of some of just the moments— I call them God moments— where we're just so overwhelmed by whatever it is in the moment that's taking us. And finding a commonality. So I agree, those are some beautiful moments, and it is interesting that when you get some of the polish off what's on there. I want to talk about something in the last few moments that we have here together that you feel like is most of importance to you, and so I kind of want to let you choose a little bit. I know you've been working on a biography, I believe, about Walter Brueggemann. Correct. And that's been one of the things you've been writing. If I'm not mistaken, and you'll have to tell me if I'm wrong because I see you a lot of times only through social media, working maybe on a novel as well. And you're just, you're a writing machine, you seem like. And it seems like you press on through at times what you seem to talk about as crippling writer's block or just, you know, I know that you've talked about struggles with depression and things like that, that I feel like we could go on for hours if we opened up too much. But any of those writing-related topics I'd love to hear more about from you and just kind of where you are on that, maybe even some of your writing practices, because what people who maybe aspire to be writers or just even when they think of writers, they don't realize that in order to be good at what you do, you have to be disciplined about what you're doing. And I know that you are. So I'd and I'm just going to kind of let you choose what direction you want to take this part of the conversation because I want to find out what's important to you.

I appreciate the chance to talk about this. So I mentioned earlier my mother who was an atheist and who was very formative to me both in terms of her, you know, when I was very young she was an architect and it formed my consciousness to watch something be on paper and then be built and to have a chance to go to the building site and to be able to literally walk through the walls that I had seen on the paper before and then eventually to see a finished house. It shapes— I can't stress how much it shapes every way that I think about everything from a conversation like this to a philosophical problem to a book that I'm reading to a movie that I'm watching. I can, because of that, I can think about the structure behind it very easily because I watched it happen. And then my mother also shaped me in terms of she struggled with alcoholism. She struggled with depression. And she was not very self-aware about these struggles but she embodied them and I watched her as she did these sorts of things and that was very formative for me. And then as I mentioned, she was an atheist. OK, well, for compressing a lot of history, we had our ups and downs but I am not an atheist and so A lot of what the last 30 years of my life was, was kind of going in and out of an orbit where my mother completely didn't understand who I was. And where I was trying to use what I understood about her to help me kind of reconnect. And that worked better and worse and we, we would have good years and bad years, literally. And I, I, I count them in years. And then in 2009, very unexpectedly, she died.

Sorry.

Oh, thank you. She died, she died, and I don't know much about the circumstances of how she died, but I do know that she died alone. And she died alone partly because she was unwilling to let go of the 35 years of accumulation that she had in the house in Columbus, Georgia, even though she hated Columbus, Georgia. You know, she had family in Michigan that she could have and should have gone back to that would have helped to care for her. But she died alone in a house surrounded by things and I didn't know that she was sick. I didn't know that this was the end and she had just found out, she had found out years before that I had been a convert to Christianity. I converted to Christianity but I had only a couple months before disclosed to her that I was Catholic and in her worldview, she was kind of Galileo was right and the Catholic Church was wrong and so the one thing that that I could be that was the worst possible thing would be Catholic. So let's just say that she died and we had unfinished business. Okay, we had unfinished spiritual business. And I was just, I had just gotten married, I had not yet found out that my wife was pregnant, we had suffered a loss of a child before that, which we don't talk about a lot. But then, you know, she died, I found out that my wife was pregnant, and I got a job as a professor. And I got into this new life and this new trajectory having, you know, I literally had to drive down in a whirlwind tour with my wife and get what I could from the house that I, that could be brought back in the car, and then the rest just had to be scattered to the wind. So I had no time to even put her affairs in order. I literally had time only to to make sure that her body was taken care of and the little that I could was taken care of and then I had to leave it all behind.

Sure.

Alright. So, as I got into my life as a professor, I began to discover that I was having problems with writing and then within the space of about 18 months, I discovered and it was gradual but I discovered that it wasn't just that I was having a problem with writing but that writing had disappeared completely, even to the point where I couldn't write longhand. And it was profound and it was— I've described it to a student. She asked one time what it was like years later when I was reflecting with her and I said it's like your arm has been cut off. You can remember picking up the coffee cup. You can remember how good the coffee tastes. You can remember how much you want to have the coffee, but there's nothing physical you can do to pick up that coffee cup. Coffee cup. That was the closest analogy I can find to what it was like. I wanted to write. I knew what I wanted to write about. I knew and had a desire to write more than anything in the world because I had all this stuff that I wanted to get out and I couldn't even write it longhand. I couldn't even make notes many of the days. And so, you know, that ended up being largely the impetus for me eventually leaving academia because if you can't write, you can't really be a professor because production is so much a part of what you— written production is so much a part of what you need to do as a professor. But it also— I had a very wise friend who at the time said, well, you can't write but you can still talk. And so that actually in 2012— so 2009, my mom dies, I get the new job and I start into it and by 2011, I figured out that I can't write. But I can't tell anybody. Because this is the kind of thing that you can't out— you can't go to your colleagues and say, "Hey, I'm having a really profound and crippling writer's block," because they would— I don't know how they would react, but I can't imagine that knowingly the school could have kept me on in that case. But around late 2011, early 2012, a very wise person said, "You can't write, but you can still talk. Maybe there's a way that you can record people in conversations, and maybe that can be useful later." And that was the other seed crystal that led to Things Not Seen, was it was a therapeutic way of trying to maneuver through my loss and my absence. And, you know, it's now 2018, so we're 9 years on from the death of my mother. And it was September of 2017, so 8 years on, when the writing came back. All right, so what I— you asked about what I want your listeners to know. I want your listeners to know that if they're going through a process of grieving. It takes its own time, and you're not bad because you can't function the way that you used to be able to function, and you're not bad because you're not, you're not recovering on somebody else's timetable. And I also want to say to your listeners that there is that of God in it, because things not seen continues to be something that blesses my life, and in many ways it got me to Chicago, it got me on the radar of the Sunday Evening Club, It has helped me to be a national figure in some ways. I'm known to people like Jim Wallace because of the work that I do, I think, on Things Not Seen. And all that would not have been possible if I had just taken the normal path. And it was grief that put me on this other path, and grief putting me on this other path has led me to a lot of blessings. So I was talking to an old friend, Peter Oaks, from University of Virginia, and we were talking about this thing with my mother, and he says, well, it sounds like your mother's continuing to bless you. You. And it was the oddest thing to have somebody say, but when he said it, it clicked. It was like, yeah, it really is, you know, not the way that I would have wanted her to, but so little in terms of the way that my mother nurtured me would have been the way that I would have asked for it, you know, in terms of my desire. So the writing came back in 2017 in September, and so what I do now is I write. And the 3 things that I want to leave with your listeners are one, kind of 2 phrases that I really animate my life. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. And whenever possible, learn in public. And so Anne Lamott, who wrote a really good book on writing called Bird by Bird, says be willing to write crappy first drafts.. And one of the things that has saved me in my writing process is the willingness to write crappy first drafts. So it doesn't have to be perfect. Nobody gets to see it. It just— it is, but it happens and I do it and it's a discipline that I come back to every day. But even though I don't let people see what I'm initially writing because it's so crappy, I try and make sure that people know that if I have a project that I have to work on and the— what you've referenced, this page and word count that I've, I've been doing for the last several weeks. Is because I'm under contract with a book for Yale, and they've been very patient during these years of my writer's block, but they finally said, "Okay, come on, Dalt. By January 1st, 2019, we need to have a 60,000-word manuscript in from you." And so to write a 60,000-word manuscript, you've got to write at least 60,000 words. You notice my voice is tripping even as I'm saying it. Because it was daunting. Well, unless you're writing 1,000 words a day for 60 days. And so I've just— I've decided that learning in public means that everybody gets to see my word count against that 60,000 every day, and I'm gonna up it by at least 1,000 every day. And this is the last piece that I want to leave with your listeners in terms of self-definition. When I first got to Chicago, I came up— and this is because of my father, who's a big fan of Zig Ziglar— motivational speakers, I came up with a phrase that defines who I am. And the phrase that defined who I— who defines who I am for Chicago is, "I make radio in Chicago and everything else is negotiable." That was kind of how I navigated everything that came at me. You know, if I have a choice to make, is it gonna keep me from making radio in Chicago? Yes, then I'm not gonna do it. Will it help me to make radio in Chicago? Yes, then I'm gonna do it. A year ago, I appended the phrase, "I make radio in Chicago and I write every day." and everything else is negotiable. I define myself as a person who writes, not a person who has to write, because if I have to write, it's a chore. But because it's what I do, and it's what I do because it's who I am, it's a joy. Because when I get a chance to do it every day, even if it's terrible, it's who I am. And that's been the piece that I've been working for almost 9 years to get back to. To, because it's always been who I am. But now, thankfully, the arm grew back and I get to do it.

Yeah.

So that— I mean, what I'd say to your listeners is don't give up hope. God is at work even in your pain and in your misery and in your loss. And as you are willing to be broken and reformed in new ways and thrown against the wall, God is faithful. It's the best I got.

David, that's a lot, man. That's great.

I don't often get a chance to talk about this. Normally I'm just asking the questions, so I appreciate very much that you really let me go on and on, and I hope I didn't go on too much, but I really— I'm thankful for the opportunity.

No, it's been great, and I especially appreciate what you said about people not rushing through their grief, and I think that's so important. One of my pet peeves is being in churches and— God love her, she still goes to my church. I don't think she listens to this show, so it won't matter. I won't name her name, but she's one of those people that every time a loved one dies, she comes up to him in church, "Praise God, they're with Jesus!" You know, and not at all what they need to hear in that moment. And I just always want to say to people, like, exactly what you said: please take time with that grief. Allow the grief to work itself out, because in And to quote Fred Rogers again, I don't think it's a direct quote, but he said something to the extent of the fact that we grieve something means that there was a great deal of love there.

Yeah.

And, and so in a way, our grieving is our way of loving. And I think that's a very powerful thing. So, well, David, this has been wonderful. Thank you for spending some time with me today. For all my listeners, I want to point you to thingsnotseenradio.com, and you can find out more about Things Not Seen, the radio show and podcast. And also, if you use Twitter, @notseenradio, and yeah, you'll find out all kinds of wonderful information. There's some great shows you can hear, and it's just been a real privilege. So David Dahl, thank you for being one of the voices in my head this week.

You're welcome, Rick. It's great to be with you. Thank you.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing on my author page on Amazon. There's also the Voices in My Head Facebook community found at facebook.com/groups/VoicesInMyHead. @RickLeeJames.com/VoicesPodcast. And if you want to follow my alter ego on Twitter, follow my popular Mr. Rogers quote account found @MrRogersSay. Also, make sure to follow my appearance schedule on my website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website at RickLeeJames.com/Booking. And it would mean the world to me if you would write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now the benediction: May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen you in your inner being for every good work. And may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.