Rod Dreher On His Crises Of Faith And Family

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com

Rod is an old-school blogger and author living in Budapest. He’s a senior editor at The American Conservative and has written several bestsellers, including The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies. He’s currently writing a book about bringing the enchantment back to Christianity in a time of growing secularism. He was enchanted himself after taking LSD in college, putting him on the path to Christianity — something he hasn’t talked about in public until now. We’ve been sparring online for a couple of decades, while remaining friends.

For two clips of our convo — Rod coming to terms with his father being in the KKK, and breaking from the Catholic Church after learning of suicides by sex-abuse victims — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: television as a way for Rod to escape the racism of the rural South, his struggle for his father’s acceptance, meeting gay kids for the first time in boarding school, his youthful indiscretions of drinking and casual sex, his family rejecting him after moving home for his dying sister, reconciling with his dad, his friendly correspondence with a gay meth addict, his current divorce and moving to Budapest, and Rod believing that homosexuality and transness are “disordered” — and my profound disagreement with him on both counts. It’s one of the most revealing episodes we’ve had yet.

Peruse the Dishcast archives for another episode you might enjoy — more than one hundred at this point. The podcast is part of The Weekly Dish on Substack. To subscribe and receive the weekly emails and full offerings, including the entire episodes, go here: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you.
0:03.0	I'm Hi there. We're back. It's another dishcast.
0:33.1	Just want to say thank you to all of you who used last week's podcast to get on with it
0:39.6	and subscribe to the weekly dish.
0:41.5	Again, we're doing it this week.
0:43.1	We're going to give the entire podcast to our readers and have it away to everybody.
0:48.9	But we wanted to give you something and we're really grateful.
0:51.9	We had a big, big bump in subscriptions. So it was good.
0:55.7	Our little nudge got you going. We have some really interesting people coming up. We have
1:02.4	John Gray, the professor. We also have Orillian Kreutu, a rather brilliant political philosopher
1:10.4	who's written about the tradition of
1:12.1	moderation in political philosophy, which is a lot more interesting and fun than it sounds.
1:17.3	And we also have maybe as a counterpoint to Rod James Allison, the Catholic priest who has
1:23.3	got into trouble with the Vatican. Well, not this Vatican, but previous Vatican's, and is,
1:29.0	and is writing and has written a great deal about reinventing Christianity in a new and rather
1:36.1	more modern way, which brings you to my first guest, my first guest, my only guest for
1:42.1	fuck sake, I'm sorry, It's been a long trip from
1:45.4	L.A. had a good time there for the weekend with Bill Maher. And oh man, we had a, I went on his
1:50.8	podcast, which is going to come out in a few weeks and God help me. But yes, it was, it was, it was,
1:55.7	it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was a lot of Indica involved. Anyway, Rod Dreher is my guest today. Rod is an old,
2:03.8	old friend. I mean, he's an old friend. He's not old and a friend. But we're both old for
2:09.6	sake. I've got to stop these, the F words, because people got upset last week. But we're both
	...

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