Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count with Carl Truman,

Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird.

Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

This week we're bringing you a bully pulpit, XL, interviewing author and First Things editor, Rusty Reno. He joins the conversation to talk

about religion and society. Let's join Rusty, Amy, Todd, and Carl.

Welcome to this week's mortification of spin.

The usual crew here.

I'm Carl Truman with my friend's Amy Bird and Todd Pruitt.

This week we're very privileged to have somebody else who's a friend, and that is Rusty Reno.

Rusty is perhaps best known today as the editor of First Things magazine,

which is the preeminent organ for the discussion of religion in the public square in the United States.

Prior to coming to First Things, Rusty taught for 20 years at Creighton University in Nebraska.

He's written books on Genesis and more recently on the state of play for religion and society in the United States.

In fact, his new book, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society,

is a must read for anybody wanting to navigate the confusing and choppy waters in which religious conservatives now find themselves in the United States.

Of course, we're living at a time where a number of books have come out recently on this topic.

Mary Ebestadt, it's dangerous to believe, religious freedom and its enemies,

John Inartz, who's confident pluralism, surviving and thriving through deep difference,

and Yuval Levin's the Fractured Republic, renewing America's

social contract in the age of individualism, have all set forth visions for what's going on in

society and how conservatives and particularly religious conservatives might respond to the current

climate. And so we've invited Rusty onto the program today to find out what

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