Rod Dreher On Politics And Religious Awe
The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan
4.6 • 836 Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2024
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rod is an old-school blogger and author living in Budapest. He’s a contributing editor at The American Conservative and has written several bestsellers, including The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies. His forthcoming book is Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, which you can pre-order on Amazon. And check out his raw and honest writing on Substack, “Rod Dreher’s Diary.”
For two clips of our convo — on what red-pilled JD Vance, and embracing the mystery of Christianity — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Rod moving to Hungary; his begrudging vote for Trump this fall; his vote for a crook against David Duke; Harris baiting, and beating, Trump in the debate; her evasion on immigration; not disavowing her extreme views from 2020; her response on Israel; the cat-eating thing; how Trump makes wokeness worse; Vance as the future of the right; his tolerance of January 6; him signing on to Trump’s abortion pivot; the Kavanaugh hearings; the canceling of Judge Kyle Duncan; politics destroying friendships; riots and speech crimes in the UK; Orbán and migrants; the war in Ukraine; racial violence on Elon’s X; rightwing anti-Semitism; Vance’s conversion to Catholicism; “childless cat ladies”; pronatalism; the sexual revolution; Ross Douthat; the loss of freedom in parenthood and its joys; Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed; Houellebecq’s Submission; Zygmunt Bauman and liquid modernity; environmental destruction; Trump’s grudge against windmills; Germany nixing nuclear power; the Iraq War; Trump vs. the neocons; his phone call to rig the vote-tally in Georgia; lawfare; the Hunter laptop story; Iain McGilchrist and the cultural crisis of the West; Pascal; religious faith arising in a crisis; conversion stories; Kierkegaard; transcendentalism; Rod attending an exorcism; demons and miracles; psychedelics as a window to the divine; Rod’s LSD trip in college; my MDMA trip in Miami; the lack of silence in modern life; and an update on my Ozempic summer.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Michelle Goldberg on Harris, David Frum on Trump, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on the history of animal cruelty, Mary Matalin on life, Anderson Cooper on loss and grief, John Gray on, well, everything, and Sam Harris for our quadrennial chat before Election Day. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you. |
| 0:03.0 | I'm going to Hello there. |
| 0:30.0 | Welcome to another dishcast on a beautiful, beautiful day here in Provincetown. |
| 0:39.1 | A couple of thoughts I wanted to talk about first before we get to our esteemed guest. And that is, a lot of you have asked me how the |
| 0:44.8 | Ozenpic is going. And I'll tell you, it's now been, what is it, three and a half months. |
| 0:49.8 | It works in as much as I was 187. I'm now 170, which is quite a lot of weight to lose in three and a half months. |
| 0:59.9 | Most of it in around my middle, I do not have as bigger belly as I used to, but I have also lost some muscle mass, which will happen to. |
| 1:07.8 | Because I've also not been terribly diligent at the gym in the summer because I |
| 1:11.3 | just want to go to the beach. I want to sit outside. I want to go into a gym and lift weights |
| 1:16.2 | with all the other gays. So I tend to goof off in the summer. But it's good. I've had two |
| 1:22.9 | major side effects, however, and it's worth pointing this out. One is that you get nausea. It hits you at |
| 1:29.5 | certain times. And it's often happened in late afternoon before I might eat in the evening, |
| 1:35.9 | and it really puts me off eating anything. And it's not a pleasant feeling. But it's mild. It's |
| 1:42.0 | not every day. Comes and goes. It's all right. But the second one is that I did every day. It comes and goes. |
| 1:44.6 | It's all right. |
| 1:48.9 | But the second one is that I did have and have had two major incidents with it. One was about a month ago, maybe a month and a half ago during my summer of Zoras, I suddenly got a massive stomach cramp and pain. |
| 2:00.6 | It felt like I was really on the verge of being sick |
| 2:04.9 | of puking, but I couldn't puke. And it carried on forever, along with pain. It went on for |
| 2:11.2 | about two hours, at which point I realized I didn't know what was happening inside me. It was |
| 2:16.7 | excruciating. And I, for the first |
| 2:18.5 | time in my life, I called an ambulance and I went to Cape Cod Hospital. That is how much pain I was |
| 2:24.8 | in. Nothing wrong with me. All my vital signs are fine. All my organs are working. The |
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