Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads: Kirsten Powers, Saving Grace
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2021
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John Dickerson talks with Kirsten Powers about her new book Saving Grace: speak your truth, stay centered and learn to coexist with people who drive you nuts.
Powers offers advice about on how to navigate the toxic divisions within our culture without compromising personal convictions and emotional well-being.
Kirsten Powers is a New York Times bestselling author, USA Today columnist, and senior political analyst for CNN, where she appears regularly on Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, and The Lead with Jake Tapper. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, Elle, The Daily Beast, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, The New York Observer, Salon, the New York Post, and The American Prospect online. Raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, Powers lives in Washington, D.C, with her fiancé, Robert Draper, and their two fur children, Lucy and Bill.
Gabfest Reads is an occasional author interview series with the hosts of Slate's Political Gabfest. Join John Dickerson, Emily Bazelon and David Plotz in one on one conversations with thought-provoking authors discussing books that range from the overtly political to the politically adjacent.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Kirsten, let's just start at the very beginning. Give me the origin story of saving grace. |
| 0:08.7 | Well, the origin story is something that might sound familiar to a lot of people. Post-2016, |
| 0:15.8 | I started to be filled with, I guess you would call it rage, maybe, filled with contempt for people |
| 0:25.0 | that I had never even met a lot of the time. It dawned on me eventually that this was just |
| 0:30.2 | unsustainable. And I basically just hit a wall where I realized that my, and it was, some of it was my behavior, but a lot of it was that internal |
| 0:40.0 | dialogue, you know, where I was just thinking and ruminating and then coming home and having the |
| 0:46.6 | same conversations and talking to my friends. And then I started to realize that my behavior |
| 0:52.6 | and my thoughts weren't really aligned with what I said I believed. |
| 0:57.5 | And as a person who's pretty open about the fact that I'm a Christian, I felt like, well, I say I love my neighbors and I say I love, you know, I'm supposed to love my enemies. |
| 1:08.4 | And I'm so far away from loving anybody that I think I need to do a course correction. |
| 1:16.0 | We should note this is not a book just for Christians, and part of the book is your own interrogation of your beliefs and questioning and going out and finding people. |
| 1:24.1 | And I want to get to sort of the list of questions or that discovery process, but you are |
| 1:30.1 | a person of faith. |
| 1:31.2 | And, you know, the central calling of our Christian faith, as I am also Christian, is that |
| 1:37.9 | incredibly difficult call to love your neighbor. |
| 1:40.0 | But you think, okay, I can do that. |
| 1:42.1 | It's not just a side note. |
| 1:43.6 | It's right down the middle of the faith. |
| 1:45.3 | I mean, you can't avoid it. |
| 1:46.2 | So you were steeped in this already, just to give listeners an idea of where you're coming from. |
| 1:53.8 | But then you also were right in the middle of political combat. |
| 1:57.6 | I mean, because you were often arguing and placed on television to argue with the other |
... |
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