Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald,

currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world

and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination.

The Emerald.

All that's happening on this green jewel in space. So I want to start today by reading a part of a wonderful interview that David Marchezy of the New York Times magazine had with late show host Stephen Colbert, who happens to be both my favorite news source and my favorite fellow

Tolkien nerd. Colbert is also a practicing Catholic, kind of an anomaly in the liberal

entertainment world, and Marchesey had the courage to ask him very sincerely about faith and how it

fits into the liberal worldview and into modern 21st century politics.

So Marchese says, I want to ask you what's probably a naive question about faith, but I promise

that it's sincere, and it's about something I'm hoping you can help me with. This is related to the

idea of how belief in nationalism is ultimately about the feeling and comfort that idea gives people, and maybe not so much about objective facts, which is to say it's about a kind of faith.

But, and I think this is part of what I've always stumbled over with religion, why is it that we might accept a form of belief that perhaps doesn't jive

with objective reality as being fundamentally problematic and socially detrimental, while another

one, religious belief, we're supposed to understand is okay. Can parallels be drawn there? And here's

Colbert's response. That's interesting. That's a really big question.

I think you're describing two different things.

Everyone approaches their own faith in their own way,

so you might be describing an exact parallel between someone's faith and our present political moment.

There might be no difference to some people.

To me, there's a difference because in the red meat that gets thrown out in many

political rallies, not just this president's, you're indulging the audience's appetite. That's

not the same thing as appealing to their principles. To indulge the audience's appetite is what my old

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