Hello and welcome to Jesuitical, a podcast from America Media for saints and sinners.

You can join us each week for honest conversations about the Catholic Church and our world today, sometimes over drinks.

I'm Ashley McKinless,

and today we have a special interview-only episode with our friend and colleague, Father James

Martin, who has a brand new book out. So here is our conversation. Joining us in studio is Father James Martin.

Father Martin is a Jesuit priest, author, editor at large at America, and founder of outreach,

an LGBTQ Catholic ministry.

And his new book is, Work in Progress, Confessions of a Busboy, Dish caddy, usher, factory worker, bank teller,

corporate tool, and priest. And it's a beautiful cover. Love it. Welcome back to Judge Liddical, Jim.

Thank you, Ashley, and thank you for matching the cover, too. Yes, of course. My 70s green.

That's right.

Avocado green. Congratulations on the book, Jim. I think it's a New York Times bestseller already, so that's amazing. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I have listened to the playlist. Good. I didn't realize that you could have a playlist for a book these days. I didn't either until my publisher suggested it. In each of the chapters, there's a song that was either kind of going on in the background of one of these summer jobs or my later jobs or a song that meant a lot to me at the time. And they said, let's do a playlist. And I think, thought that was kind of fun. So we did it. It's on Spotify. It's awesome. It's really like a 70s, 80s playlist. If you want to just get back into that era, that's a great place to start. Well, and I also said it is not a playlist of things, the songs that I think are cool now or that would define the era. These are songs that I actually listened to when I was, you know, 15, 16. That's pretty vulnerable. I don't know if I would want people looking at my 13-year-old playlist. Well, I put it all out there. So there it is. So the soundtrack to your life is out there and then the book is out there for folks to get. So thanks for coming on to talk about it, Jim. My pleasure. So obviously you have written a number of books, many of which we've talked to you about on this show. But this is a pretty new genre.

You know, you've written a number of books, many of which we've talked to you about on this show.

But this is a pretty new genre.

You know, you've written about Jesus and prayer and books in the gospel.

This is autobiography.

What inspired the turn inward or backwards to your past?

Well, the actual inspiration was that my last two books, as you know, were on the raising of Lazarus, come forth,

and then a book on prayer could learning to pray. And they were both pretty serious and pretty heavy.

I mean, Lazarus is not exactly a laugh riot story. And I wanted to just do something that was a little

lighter. I've long thought about writing these kind of crazy summer job stories. It's a bit of a

vanishing age,

...