All right, welcome listeners to episode 91 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast co-host,

and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam Heather Bell.

Hey Samuel, hi Matt. I am so excited to share this conversation with listeners.

I don't even want to banter with you.

I just finished listening to Jesse's cut of it,

our intrepid producers cut of our conversation

with Christian Wyman, who's a poet and a professor at Yale Divinity School, and he recently

came out with a book titled Zero at the Bone, 50 entries against despair.

It was published in December, but really we just been wanting to have a

conversation with him for a while and this was a great excuse and it was really exhilarating.

Yeah, it was profoundly moving and interesting in real time and then I agree with you when I

listened to the cut I was blown away.

Chris is just, I don't know, one of the most interesting writers and thinkers alive today would you say I think so I say this I think in the conversation but reading two of his books and a bunch of his poetry and preparation for this, it was like one of those rare-ish moments where a writer I had never read any of,

although I had heard lots of good things from you, really just blew my mind and changed

the way I thought about a whole lot of stuff.

Yes, I think that was one of the really

interesting parts of this conversation,

having it not just with Chris but with you Sam is that this was your first

time really exploring Chris's work and as listeners will hear Chris is someone I've known now for over

a decade and in fact it was about a

decade ago I wrote an 8,000 word essay on Christian Wyman for Andrew Sullivan's

old website the dish I met Chris he visited my church in Charlottesville, Virginia when I lived

...