Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. My name is Brad O'Nishi. I am

Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College and I am joined

today by a very special guest,

Asha Daya, who is the editor-in-chief of Girl Talk HQ.

She is a broadcast journalist who's worked on three continents in the UK and Australia and now in the

United States as a TEDx speaker, somebody who works for reproductive rights and has now written a great new book called

Today's Wonder Women, Superheroes, ordinary superheroes who are

changing the world.

And I just want to say first of all thanks for being

here us really appreciate it. Thank you for having me it's great it's up to

chatting with you. Folks I just want to say from the bat I'm having internet trouble today because I think the whole

world is on Zoom and a lot of folks are working from home so we're going to do

our best to get the best audio quality possible but anyway Aisha thank you so much for being here and one of the reasons that, you know, we've interacted on Twitter and other places and one of the things that is so compelling for our audience about your story is just, you know, you grew up mainly in Australia, you're Indian

by ethnicity, you've, you know, you spent time in your early life in the UK, but spent a lot of time

in Australia as a young person.

And evangelicalism is nowhere near as sort of widespread and influential in Australia as it is in somewhere like the United States,

but you did grow up with a kind of

evangelical upbringing and then as we'll get to you really did have a kind of very stark and jarring deconstructing deconstructing

deconstructing process later in life.

So I guess I just wanted to ask about,

you know, your early life and how it was living as an evangelical young person in Australia.

Like how did your life look when you were young?

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