Hello and welcome to Straight Wide American Jesus. I am your host Dan Miller, Associate

Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Straight Wide American

Jesus is hosted in partnership with the Cap Center at University of California, Santa

Barbara. I want to thank everybody for joining me today. This is the first of what will be

an ongoing series, typically we post these on Wednesdays. And I'm thinking of this as kind

of a weekly explainer. Those of you who listen to the podcast and have kept up with things

that I do, or maybe you've been part of our seminar series that we've done, or maybe

you know us from other places, you know that I am among other things a very colossal

geek. And one of my geeky interests is in issues related to social theory, society, politics.

These are all topics that we talk about on the podcast. And one of the things that happens

is, as you all know, and as people tell us all the time, there's a lot of really bad

discussion about things like religion and politics in America that goes on. And we talk

about, you know, your hypothetical Uncle Ron, quite a bit. The people that you might have

in your life that you meet at a cookout, or maybe you just had Thanksgiving dinner with

them, or some other holiday get together, or maybe you'll see them on New Year's and

New Year's Eve. And they bring up discussions of things and they just don't sound right.

They don't make sense to you. But it's not always easy to understand exactly what's going

wrong or how to counter that. And I living as I do in the academic world know that there

are a lot of really, really, really smart people who say and think really, really smart things

about religion and society and politics. But they spend most of their time talking to other

academics and they write most of those things in journals and in different places like that

and books that are not accessible to most people. And if most regular people can get their

...