Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology and Rom. My guest today is Dr. Thomas Tweed, who did his graduate study at Harvard and Stanford, and he is the Harold and Martha Welch, Professor of American Studies and Professor of History at Notre Dame University.

Dr. Tweed served as the president of the American Academy of Religion in 2015, which is the largest learned society for the study of religion. He's the author of many

books, including the more recent book, Religion in the Lands, that became America, a new history

published by Yale University Press. Super excited about this conversation. I learned a ton. I loved

Dr. Tweed's posture and his wealth of knowledge, and I think you will too.

So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one-rolling, Thomas Tweed.

Welcome to Theology and Arrha, Dr. Thomas Tweed.

I'm very excited about this conversation.

You are an expert in the history of the land we now call the United States of America that precedes 1776.

How long did it take you to write your recent book, first of all?

I mean, I'm looking at it.

And it's just like every line of all. I mean, I'm looking at it, and it's just like, every line

the book is like built on extensive research, it seems like. I mean, this must have been a

massive project. Yeah, it was, it was really massive. I started writing actually 12 years ago,

but started researching before that. And the first time I said

we should do a new narrative was when dinosaurs roamed the earth in 1988. I was the first year

of teaching. And I said, you know, I wonder if maybe we should think, tell about it, tell

it in a new way. So I've been working on a long time, and every paragraph is like a mini article

or a book, but readers don't want to read all that, so I just try to make it move more quickly.

So it took a long time to figure out where to start and to figure out to learn what I had to

learn. I think they didn't know. So it meant crossing from history, my

home field, to other fields, and looking at archaeology, climatology, all kinds of things.

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