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Welcome to Straight Wide American Jesus.

My name is Brad Ornishi, Faculty of the University of San Francisco.

Our source is in a partnership with the Cap Center, UCSB, and I'm here today with my co-host Dan Miller.

So is your professor of religion and social thought at landmark college and it's good to see you Brad. How are you doing?

Good. This is one of those weeks, Dan, where you remember when you were a grad student, like I remember when I was a grad student at Oxford and basically my whole job every day was to like wake up, read, take notes, maybe write an essay about what I'm reading.

Go to the library, check out some sources that I need to like put together for my project, you know, go home and write a little bit, maybe go to like a lecture, you know, go to a reading seminar where people are talking about some cool stuff and then like maybe go have a pint of beer and talk with a friend about all the cool stuff for learning or like this theological issue or we can't believe so and so said that in that lecture.

And I just thought, you know, it's going to be so great to hold life as a professor of just this kind of contemplation and reading and here we are, Dan, just like in the middle of the semester and I feel like my life as an academic and as as as an intellectual is as about meetings and then more meetings and then maybe meetings about meetings and then maybe emails about meetings.

And it's a whole thing, I don't know, do you feel this way?

Yeah, after we finish this, I'm literally going to a meeting about meetings that that's literally what it's about it's a meeting about how some other meetings next semester should be scheduled and the real reason I became an academic Brad is to help students register for classes every semester that's the that's the real it's the real joy that gets me up in the morning so that's mine is a

lots of making meetings with students who don't show up and then wonder why they can't get in classes when they miss the registration deadline or who haven't looked at courses at all and want to come and I guess have me read to them.

Yeah, these are the real reasons it wasn't the wasn't the life of the mind wasn't that I enjoyed learning or teaching or writing. Nope, it was that stuff.

So now actually in all seriousness, this is I'm sure it is for you is this nice kind of respite when we get to kind to do the kind of stuff that we thought academia might be talking about things that matter to people who might be interested in learning about those things. So yeah, this is a nice break from the meetings about meetings and those other things it's not as bad as we're making out I think it's just it's a particularly tough time in the semester and it can feel that way obviously this is the how it always is, but you know, we should maybe start.

A spin-off podcast from the life of the mind to the life of the grind, what do you think, Dan? No, all right. I think you're better at titles. Yeah, that's what I think. Okay, can you all tell we're tired, we're tired, it's been a long week, but you know what, we got so much important stuff to talk about.

There's so many things to dig into yesterday, we had a survey data drop, we had new stuff come out from pure religion.

And from PRRI, which means there's just all this new statistics about how Americans think about religion in the country. So we want to talk about that.

Want to talk about also what's happening in Pennsylvania and the ways that Trump and Tucker Carlson and others are priming the pump setting up a situation where

roles election results will be challenged and

perhaps Republican and Mogga voters will not be willing to accept them. And then what happens next. So that's where we're at. Before we go there, I want to say, Dan, I've seen a ton more sign ups for our Denver event every time I kind of check it out. There's people who are coming and excited to be there and I can't wait.

Some of you all need to get your tickets and you're waiting and what's going to happen is you're going to have Halloween and, you know, you're going to eat so much candy, you're being like candy drunk for like a week and you're going to wake up and be like, oh my god.

There's like four days before the swadge event and I haven't even picked out my outfit yet. What am I going to wear on the zoom. You're going to be really stressed out. Just get your ticket now. So you don't have to do that. All right. So November 18, Denver.

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