Hello everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to a

brand new season of Speaking with Joy. I have been on as long a hiatus as I've ever been on since doing the

podcast, I think, buried deep in my PhD cave. I just turned in a full draft to my advisor,

which was such a fun thing and a relief. And now I have no idea what to do with myself,

except for to become

embroiled and excited about doing a new season of speaking with joy.

And the theme for that season actually kind of came from the experience of finishing this

PhD.

Writing an 80,000 word dissertation on the one hand can seem to be something that's very isolated,

right? Nobody else can write your dissertation for you. You have to sit and slog it through largely

by yourself. But at the same time, as I finished those final words and went through editing sections, I couldn't help but think that

this whole experience and the fruit of it in this long project was really a culmination of

conversations. Many, many, many, many conversations. First, of course, you know, the conversations

with my advisor, testing ideas, trying. First, of course, you know the conversations with my advisor,

testing ideas, trying things out, eating raspberry slices, the many conversations that I had with

colleagues. But even more than that, the hundreds and hundreds of books that I read, or, well,

rather perhaps not the entire books, but the chapters of books that I read.

And the kind of way that scholarship becomes this conversation with many different authors and

many different books and many different traditions over years and years and years.

And then I thought about the conversations that would spring out of particular sections

...