This is thinking in public a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mola your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ross Dauphit is one of the most important public intellectuals in the United States these days.

You know him as a columnist for the New York Times.

Before joining the Times, he was a senior editor for The Atlantic.

He's also a student of American culture, the film critic for National Review, and he has appeared regularly on television.

He's the author of several books, including Bad Religion, How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

Privilege, Harvard, and the education ruling class, and to change

the church, Pope Francis, and the future of Catholicism.

Today we'll talk about his newest book, The Decident Society, How we became the victims of our own success.

Ross, it takes a certain amount of self-confidence to write a book entitled The Decident Society.

And, you know, that word is going to immediately send some flags up that this is something of a cry of the heart

It's also not your first book. How do you get to the point where you're writing a book entitled The Decident Society, how we became victims of our own success?

Well, honestly, Al, I just turned 40, so I feel that I've now finally reached the age where I can offer sweeping assessments of our

civilization just as I sort of you know start the start the slow slide towards my own

mortality so that's that's the justification at least for these kind of making sweeping pronouncements. But I think this is a this is a book that it's trying to explain in a way what I think are two feelings that people have

simultaneously about not just America but sort of Western society, the developed world writ large.

And one of those feelings is this sense of crisis and looming disaster everywhere you look

and sort of depression despair anxiety which is so much a part of I feel like our media atmosphere and the sort of cultural

psyche of our times.

And then that coexist with this, you know, this sort of statistical reality

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