Ross Douthat: Why You Should Be Religious
The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan
4.6 • 836 Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ross is a writer and a dear old colleague, back when we were both bloggers at The Atlantic. Since then he’s been a columnist at the New York Times — and, in my mind, he’s the best columnist in the country. The author of many books, including Grand New Party and The Decadent Society, his new one is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (which you can pre-order now). So in this podcast, I play — literally — Devil’s advocate. Forgive me for getting stuck on the meaning of the universe in the first 20 minutes or so. It picks up after that.
For two clips of our convo — on the difference between proselytizing and evangelizing, and the “hallucinations of the sane” — see our YouTube page.
Other topics: Creation; the improbable parameters of the Big Bang; the “fine-tuning” argument I cannot understand; extraterrestrial life; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Hitch; the atheist/materialist view; the multiverse; quantum physics; consciousness; John von Neumann; Isaac Newton; human evolution; tribal survival; the exponential unity of global knowledge; Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith; the substack Bentham’s Bulldog; why humans wonder; miracles; Sebastian Junger and near-death experiences; the scientific method; William James; religious individualists; cults; Vatican II; Pope Francis; the sex-abuse crisis in the Church; suffering and theodicy; Lyme Disease; the AIDS crisis; Jesus and the Resurrection; Peter J Williams’ Can We Trust the Gospels?; and the natural selection of religions.
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: Jon Rauch on the tribalism of white evangelicals; Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Yoni Appelbaum on how America stopped building things, Chris Caldwell on the political shifts in Europe, Nick Denton on the evolution of new media, Francis Collins on faith and science, and Mike White of White Lotus fame. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Hi there. Welcome to another riveting, exciting, fascinating, |
| 0:33.2 | episode of The Dishcast. |
| 0:36.6 | Please subscribe. |
| 0:38.7 | If you haven't subscribed to be a subscriber to the weekly dish, this fascinating |
| 0:44.8 | conversation will peter out halfway through and you'll be very frustrated. |
| 0:48.4 | So if you'd like to listen to the whole conversation as well as all the conversations |
| 0:52.7 | they have it in full, as well as all the many features of the dish, apart from the main column, |
| 0:59.3 | please subscribe. It helps us, it supports us, is what makes this possible. Coming up, |
| 1:06.1 | we have some amazing guests. Actually, I mean, we seem to get lucky and lucky on this. |
| 1:10.6 | Evan Wolfson is coming in to talk about the history of marriage equality and where we've ended |
| 1:15.4 | up in the L'Igibre de Croix mess. Yoni Applebaum, an old Atlantic colleague, has written |
| 1:23.8 | a really interesting book called Stuck, which is about how America stopped building |
| 1:27.7 | things. Chris Caldwell has agreed to come in, come back and talk about what's going on in Germany. |
| 1:33.2 | We've got elections there this February. The revival of populism in Europe and the slow collapse |
| 1:41.0 | of the center left over there. Nick Denton is coming on to talk about the evolutionary media and wherever he is now, which is not where he was. |
| 1:49.1 | Francis X. Collins, the great scientist and Christian, is going to come in too. |
| 1:54.6 | Finally managed to find him and get him to come on. |
| 1:56.8 | And Mike White, the creator of the White Lotus, and of course, one of many interesting things |
| 2:04.3 | in his life, son of obviously a major evangelical Mel White, knows that world from the inside |
| 2:10.4 | out and is not part of it. But today we have Ross, doubt that Ross is the best columnist in America. |
| 2:19.4 | I don't mind saying that. |
| 2:21.2 | He's giggling, but it's true. |
... |
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