Hello and welcome back to Close Reeds here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Now, normally we would be bringing you a brand new episode this week. But for a couple of reasons,

we're going to just be bringing you a special bonus episode in which I appeared on another podcast.

So the reason we're doing this is, well, there's multiple reasons.

One is that, as many of you know, my wife just had a baby last week. We are, what, five days

into her life now. So she is happy and healthy, and we are very grateful for that. And we are also

very grateful for all of your kind comments and your well wishes and your prayers

last week and over the last couple days as well. But that means that my life has been thrown

into a little bit of chaos as I've been in the office a little bit less. And so we have not been

able to get to our regularly, regularly scheduled

programs. So what we're going to do is run this episode of the bookening. The bookening is another

Christian literature podcast, so to speak. And they invited me to come on to talk about Flanar

O'Connor, essentially to defend Flanarie O'Connor, I think. So I hope you'll enjoy this conversation.

I joined the guys from the bookening,

and after our intro music here,

you will hear their intro music and kick into their version of the show.

So it's their show.

I'm just appearing on it,

but I thought you guys might like to listen to this conversation

about Flannery O'Connor while we are kind of on a one-week hiatus here

on Close Reads. So again, thanks for your kind words and your prayer requests. And happy

Thanksgiving to everybody. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And we will be back next week with

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