I will stay close to the microphone and then I want you to just completely relax and forget to

the microphone is there, okay? Okay. I'll do my best. I know. So I was saying we have a luxury

here. This is not a live interview. We get to have a real conversation and I feel like what we're

you know your subject matter is so large and you have so many stories and I'm not exactly sure

exactly which direction we'll go with this. So let's just let's just see what happens.

Okay. But you know what I'm very curious about and I'd like to hear first is

how you got into all of this and a little something about your background that you brought to

to this field of study, this this these communities that you found yourself so so involved with.

Yeah. The route was somewhat circuitous. I grew up in the south and the southeastern United

States and sort of developed an interest very young in the role that church has played in

social movements, social activism. I think that's easy to do when you're surrounded by it and

in the history of the south. And I went to undergraduate school looking to kind of ask some

questions about that and found myself where many people find themselves looking at the history

of African-American churches. But I found as I was moving toward thinking about graduate work

that at this time, the early 1990s, mid 1990s recently, there was a new development, there were many

new developments happening in the area of vast numbers of immigrants coming into the south that

had not historically been here. Yeah, especially in the southeast. That's right. Yes, the southeast

has had the fastest growing immigrant population for quite a few years now and it's it's something

that not many people have attended to because we tend to think of immigration as a phenomenon that

happens in places like New York and Houston and Los Angeles. And I so I took the same sorts of

questions I had been asking and started to ask them about religious groups that were working with

immigrants and churches were immigrants worshiped and doing that inevitably led me as a careful

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