In Conversation with David Goa

We first met a number of years ago when I was curating the international exhibition Anno Domini, Jesus Through the Centuries for the year 2000. I discovered, quite by happenstance, that the marvelous hand-woven tapestry Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me by the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1998) was the property of the Church of Saint Andrew and Saint Paul in Montreal. Richard Topping was the pastor of the church and was eager to see Burn-Jones' work grace the exhibition. We met face to face some years later when he became Principle of Saint Andrews Hall and then President of the Vancouver School of Theology, at the University of British Columbia.  Richard has a deep knowledge of the reformer John Calvin and the twentieth century's great theologian Karl Barth. I want to know what each of them and what Richard made of the church, how they thought about her gifts and what she means in our world. I turned to Richard and our conversation ranged from the 16th century, through the Nazi period that captured so much of the church in Germany, to our own day and the gifts and missteps that mark churches and the faithful in our fragile world.     Welcome to our conversation. 

Mikel Laurie is pastor of the Highlands Baptist Church in Edmonton. He previously served a United Church. His move from a progressive form of Protestantism to and evangelical church is of particular interest for our conversations on the Ekklesia.   Our conversation moves from his initial work in the United Church, his studies at Regent College, the Vancouver School of Theology and Trinity Western University touching on his time with a peace minister into “the troubles” in Northern Ireland. Mikel is the only person I have known who has met face to face with Ian Paisley, the militant Protestant leader central to the fractured society of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and following. We explore the Baptist idea of doctrinal purity, the “attractional” model of evangelical worship centered on one form or another of spectacle. What attracts people to this model and what does it nurture in them? Has the pandemic ruptured this model of church? 

I have had the pleasure over the last decade or so of thinking with Ray Sawatsky about religion and culture. I am delighted to talk with him in this series of conversations on the Ekklesia. He is an astute commenter on the entanglement between a number of political interests and evangelical church leaders. How have these entanglements shaped his generation's growing unease and distance from the churches that shaped their childhood?  Ray has worked very effectively with a number of para-church organizations, family charities, educational institutions and think tanks, all part of the broad evangelical world. Few have as rich a sense of the shape and reshaping of the evangelical tradition and there implications for both church and the larger culture. He explores the model of the evangelical churches international charitable work. In the last few years, he has been giving sober second-thought to much of what he has been a partner in. Where is “the other” in the evangelical world? Why the fixation on the sexual life? Is charitable work also a process of manufacturing “need” and the latest chapter in colonialism? Have we created a charitable industrial complex? Are megachurches a kind of spiritual Walmart? How did this unfold and where does it lead? 

Pastor Ingrid grew up in post-war Germany and navigated the trauma of the war's shadow. She discusses the habit of taking refuge in church doctrine as a way of avoiding the responsibility for what unfolded in Germany; the church as a gathering of family and friends, of the like-minded, while teaching engagement with strangers; a church “turned inwards”. She speaks of the gifts she was given by the homeless who sought shelter under the porch at Trinity Lutheran Church in Edmonton; the deep regard for social justice that seemed, at times, to accompany a drawing away from worship and its gift of leading us to draw near to God's presence; and, a sense of never being able to do enough for the healing of the world. She speaks of her vision of the church as a guest house for all focused both on confession, communion and working with a steady hand to heal the wounds of our common life. In November of 2021 Pastor Ingrid became the pastor at Saint Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Vancouver, where she now serves in English and German.

Jacques Maritain was raised a protestant in France initially studying science at the Sorbonne in Paris. He became disillusioned with the perspective of scientism that dominate the academy. Attending the lectures of Henri Bergson whose work highlighted the place of intuition and sympathy Maritain and his wife Raissa Oumansoff, a Russian Jew, set upon a new path which led to their entering the Roman Catholic Church. Maritain has written “just about everything” and Jason West was working through his book Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. Knowing Professor West's penchant for logic and reason I was interested on hearing how art and the third transcendental, the beautiful, was woven into his thought.   Professor West's intellectual journey took him from atheism through the study of medieval logic and the work of Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas. A solitary month reading and rereading Saint Augustine's The Confessions and a friend's casual invitation to attend the Roman Catholic liturgy, not unlike Maritain, led him into the Church.      Our conversation begins with Maritain, art, logic and reason and concludes thinking about the good, the true, and the beautiful.         Welcome to our conversation. 

And there are others: those who have cultivated a sense of place, alert to what is unfolding. They work for a better common world and do so because ambition has not dimmed or colonized their aspirations. Usually, you have to look to find them since those with ambition tend to fill the public space.  Among the indigenous peoples of Canada this distinction is vivid. Elders and knowledge keepers, often quiet and behind the scenes, tend the flames that enlighten and draw forth the pure water that mirrors what is unfolding, “the signs of the times”; those who speak, often a quiet word that illuminates how we may live attentive to the beauty and richness of our life together, a world fit for our children and our children’s children.  Margaret Rathnavalu grew up on a farm near the hamlet of Duhamel in the Camrose district of Alberta. At the University of Alberta, she studied education. Following two years of teaching in Peace River she joined the development agency, the Canadian University Studies Overseas (CUSO) and went to Zambia in 1964. She taught children for six years. Then she returned to Canada with her husband Lawrence and together they moved to Wabasca-Desmarais, the home of the Big Stone Cree and Woodland Cree peoples. They both taught for three years. They listened, and learned and became friends. Returning to Camrose in 1980 she taught at the Chester Ronning School until her retirement in 2001.  Margaret regularly seeks to engage political leadership, municipal, provincial, and federal as well as her fellow citizens. I have admired the depth of her learning about the challenges we all face given how the economy of Alberta and our larger world has been shaped. Fracking, the mining of the Fort McMurray region and coal on the eastern sloops of the Rocky Mountains, the despoiling of the waters of life, all have called her to listen and speak and seek healing. Her formation, learning, and her experience engaging politicians and corporate leadership surfaces many important lessons. 

Our conversation begins with a brief reflection on Augustine, Aquinas and Luther with Augustine highlighted as the one who opens the gate in a post-Christian world.Ryan Topping’s early formation was within a Mennonite community he continues to treasure in his heart. A period of time followed in and shaping an intentional community with a common purse and common work and with the good fortune of studying with several professors, Orthodox, Catholic and Anabaptists, for whom the “great tradition was alive and shedding light on the spirit of our age.” During his doctoral studies at Oxford University, he and his wife sought the fulness of the Christian tradition and explored Orthodox and Roman Catholic soil, roots and spiritual and theological pathways. Our conversation touches on Nietzsche, Habermas, Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali and others along with his professor and mentor Aidan Nichols of Blackfriars, Oxford, who led him reluctantly at first and then joyously into the Roman Catholic Church. Our conversation concludes speaking about the new shape education of priests and laity alike is taking at Newman Theological College.

As a child Lorraine sat on her uncle’s knee watching the television series MASH and eating vanilla ice cream flavored with creme de menthe. Her parents, one Scottish Presbyterian and one Irish Catholic, regularly invited their respected clergy over for dinner and hospitable conversation across religious lines. Not surprising she grew up with an interest in the depth of the Christian spiritual tradition. She studying philosophy and ethics at Dominica College University in Ottawa. It was here that the depth of Christian thinking about the spiritual life was opened to her. Building on her initial intellectual formation she went on to do her Master and Doctorate degrees with a research program on trauma and healing, on “moral injury”, the undoing of one’s sense of character, on guilt and forgiveness., on being both a victim and victimizer.  Since the common psychiatric models have been largely ineffective with returning soldiers she has worked at finding the healing waters that spring from the continuous work on the spiritual life at the heart of Christian understanding.     

Steve grew up on the Westside of Chicago. He received a football scholarship to Notre Dame and has a stellar journalistic record. A small intimate storefront church was central to his formation and, in more recent years, he has engaged the gifts of the Orthodox Church that, of course, has deep roots in African and the Levant long before it migrated to Europe. Our conversation begins with his family of blessed memory in Memphis, Tennessee, and their migration to Chicago. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles were all laid to rest in a small town cemetery, a pilgrimage site for Steve. They are his most intimate saints and martyrs.   We recorded our conversation in the late fall of 2019 prior to the crisis shaking both our countries. In listening to it to prepare this podcast I was struck at how it has enlarged what I hear in the voices of Steve’s brothers and sisters (and mine) and of our First Peoples in Canada. Moving through the prism of slavery and freed of the luxury of hatred, the last bonds that hold all victims, it speaks to the salvation offered to those of us who are privileged. Are we ready to receive it, ready to step out of the prison of privilege, the precincts we are blind to?      Welcome to our conversation. 

Central to Professor Ferrin’s perspective is how he understands Islamic civilization (to be distinguished form Islamic Empire) and the recent development of Islamism. Put another way: how has it come about that “religionism” and a curious kind of nationalism have come to be wedded in the mind and heart of some forming a new identity claiming to be that of a “pure Islam”? In the Quran it says that when there is no more trade and no more friendship the world ends. Ferrin’s deep study of the living tradition of Islam sees its central gift as brotherhood across societies, languages, cultures, and even religious commitments. Islamism, to the contrary, is a bricolge, made up of desperate elements creating an ideology of religious substitution adopted by those who see themselves and their society as impotent in the face of colonial and modernizing forces. This is the root of its apocalyptic and puritanical view creating silos of identity anchored in nostalgia for a past that never existed. One is faithful to the extent one becomes a warrior of the last day. My sense is that this should not surprise Christians and secularists since we have similar reductionist movements in our world. 

David combines, as few do, superb legal analysis with equally superb theological thinking. When Karl Bath, who stands alongside the Apostle Paul, Maximus the Confessor, Aquinas, and Calvin, came to America in 1962 he met William Stringfellow. Stingfellow was a lawyer like Calvin and David. Barth said Stringfellow was the finest theological mind in America. If the great theologian were to come today and was fortunate enough to meet David he would laud him as well.  My own thinking is always enlarged by the conversations we have had over the years moving in areas I have only occasionally considered. What is the purpose of law, not just how it functions technically as a profession but the why of law? Why is justice important? Similarly what gift does business bring to our common life? What is the inner dynamic of the businessperson, the way one must engage in a full range of considerations to accomplish stated purposes and live or die based on one’s judgment, decisions, and relationships? Does the Conservative tradition still exist within our political parties? And, is capitalism, as some have recently argued, at the end of its tether? While it may be a stretch for some, certainly not for David, how does the Christian understanding of the Incarnation and the Trinity shift thinking on these practical questions and move them beyond the usual theological reduction imposed by ideology on both the right and left. Finally, there is the question of stewardship and philanthropy. What has motivated David and others to devote half their time and all their skill and energy to seeing that artists and others with cultural vision may flourish? Welcome to our conversation. 

I grew up listening to conversation on Christian Zionism. This idea developed after the Reformation, received clear articulation in seventieth century England, flourished in the 1840s and has continued down to our own day anchoring much of the support for the policy of the Israeli government among North American evangelicals and others. Christian Zionists believe that the gathering of Jews in Israel is a requirement for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the unfolding of the end of history. In my home province of Alberta several forms of this teaching flourished. In the 1930s both the Premier of Alberta from 1935 - 1943, “Bible” Bill Aberhart, and L.E. Maxwell, founder of Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills Alberta spread this teaching through their radio ministries and Bible teaching. It took root and continues to inform a relationship to Israel, a peculiar understanding of the Jewish people of whom Jesus Christ was a part, and is used as an effective political tool garnering support for a whole range of issues. Historians have argued that it also migrated into Jewish, largely secular Jewish circles, and seeded forms of Zionism that are foundational to the Israeli state. One of the foremost Jewish scholars of this matter is Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro. He forcefully argues that Zionism has moved Jewish identity away from the Covenant and Commandments, which called the Jewish people, as the scriptures tell us, “to be a holy people and a nation of priests”. Zionism has grabbed the limelight and confused the question of what it means to be a Jew. Is Jewishness an ethnicity, a tribal identity, a national identity of one nation among others? Or, is it, “to be a holy people and a nation of priests”? Rabbi Shapiro is Emeritus Rabbi, Bais Medrash of Bayswater, Queens, New York. After graduating high school at age 16 he entered a traditional Orthodox program of education and intellectual formation.

David Brooks, one of America’s fine public intellectuals in his recent book The Second Mountain, quotes C.S. Lewis. I remember reading Lewis’ comment years ago and was delighted to have it brought to mind. “The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.” In preparing this conversation with Ray Sawatsky I heard the echo of Lewis’ words. Ray is CEO and Executive Director of the international NGO Global Aid Network (GAIN). They partner with local governments and churches in various places around the world drilling wells where water is increasingly scarce. Our conversation turned and returned to the three transcendental, the good, the true, and the beautiful. We explore the gifts and challenges he was bequeathed through his early formation in the Brethren Gospel Halls, an evangelical and fundamentalist portion of the protestant church with an impact far above its weight. The gifts of the Brethren Church carried a shadow that Ray has struggled with and found his way through.  His insight into the brokenness that so often frames human experience, his surprised discovery of the love and compassion of God, and his growing recognition that the two commandments in the Gospel, to love God above all and ones neighbour as ones self has transformed his understanding of charity into a call for “faithful presence” to those we are blessed to come to know.

Some years ago I hosted Norton in Edmonton for several lectures on the demanding geo-political issues that so often frame our understanding of Israel/Palestine. We also traveled and lectured in Syria and Turkey and engaged colleagues in the Muslim community. Norton is a considerable critic of Israeli political policy toward the Palestinians. This has often garnered the ire of supporters of the Government of Israel and the favour of supporters of Palestinians. I have also watched as he carefully and forcefully responded to his audiences and taught them to distinguish between political criticism and the kind of anti-Semitism such critique can mask. In our conversation we explore his childhood formation in a loving Orthodox Jewish family in Ames, Iowa, his study with a teacher of Hebrew and Bible several days a week in Des Moine beginning when he was five and continuing through his eighteenth birthday. His reading of Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, and author of the seminal book, Jewish Civilization was the beginning for his thinking about the implications Zionism and his thinking developed through his friendship and work with Rabbi Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism. Norton’s father came to Ames, Iowa, from Ukraine in 1912 aspirating to live as an Orthodox Jew among non-Jews. As Norton took me back thought his life to his childhood it was his father’s vision that I began to see as the affective kernel unfolding through his life and work. I welcome you to our conversation.

In June I sat down with Bradley Jersak at his home in Abbottsford British Columbia. He is a teacher and preacher who’s formation was in the evangelical church, Baptist and Mennonite with a little of the charismatic movement along the way. He also studied at Briercrest College and Seminary in Saskatchewan, Trinity Western University in Langley and, most recently, received his Ph.D in theology from Bangor University in Wales. We have known each other for a number of years having met at All Saints of North America Monastery outside of Mission British Columbia when he was taking his initial steps exploring Patristic theology and growing into the Orthodox Church. Our conversation ranges from his early formation and the gifts of the evangelical church that have shaped him: a love of the scriptures and the life of prayer and his early personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We talk about his Pauline like ministry that, largely, continues with evangelical seekers and his deepening understanding of the ancient church’s teaching about the spiritual life, about the love and mercy of God vividly present in the Christ of the Gospels. For a number of years he pastored Fresh Wind Christian Fellowship, a church in service to people with disabilities, children, “prodigals”, and the poor. I admired this work from first hearing about it. Bradley, or Irenaeus as I call him, is an author and teacher and is a Reader and the monastery preacher at All Saints of North America Orthodox Monastery. He teaches Patristics and New Testament at Westminster Theological Centre in the United Kingdom and at Saint Stephen’s University in New Brunswick. You can visit Brad's website at https://bradjersak.com (https://bradjersak.com/) I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.

My friend Greg Pennoyer who sits on the board of Prison Fellowship International (PFI) introduced me to Andrew Corley who became the President and CEO of PFI a year ago. I welcomed the opportunity to meet for several reasons. First, is the work in prisons through the Ephesus project colleagues and I have engaged over the last few years. Second, is Andy’s formation and service through the Salvation Army, an evangelical church that befriended my mother in Norway when she was a small child.  Evangelicals have long been leaders in prison ministry around the world. Charles Colson, chief counsel for President Richard Nixon, founded Prison Fellowship following his guilty plea in the midst of the Watergate inquiry and his incarceration at the Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Alabama for seven months. There are now national Prison Fellowships in 119 countries spanning various cultures and religious communities and Prison Fellowship International works with all of them assisting in ways to enlarge their good work.  Andrew developed his strategic thinking and leadership skills in management as director of global construction companies. I welcome you to our conversation moving from his way of shaping business and questions of purpose, on what it means to be “salt and light” in the market place, and, on how working in prisons is transformative for those who enter behind the walls of separation. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.

Last November I was invited to animate a Round Table conversation in the Faculty of Divinity at Necmeddin Erbakan University in Konya, Turkey. Konya was the home of the great Sufi mystic Rumi and the Faculty of Divinity has a large professoriate and well over 2000 students, mostly women. In my Round Table remarks I discussed American Evangelical Christianity including its current role in America culture.  Several of my remarks resonated with Tahir Uluc, Professor of Islamic Philosophy, and the author of a number of books largely on the Sufi tradition of Islam in Turkey. We met following the Round Table and discussed the gifts and challenges facing Turkey and our larger world. Professor Uluc is a keen observer of Turkey, a fine professor who has a deep interest in his students and in education in Turkey. Some context is important to understand what continues to unfold in Turkey and Professor Uluc’s concerns. When the Ottoman Empire ended following the First World War Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic of Turkey and becoming its first President in 1923. His political party led the modernization of Turkey and ushered in a secular state that modeled itself after elements in France following its Revolution in 1789. Religion was removed from its central place in Turkish culture, many religious leaders were executed, some banished, and others went underground. Fine contributions were mixed with virulent ones, as is so often the case with sweeping social change. With the election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan as Prime Minister along with his Justice and Development Party in 2003 another set of remarkable changes were ushered in. I have visited Turkey a number of times in the last decade and appreciated many of these changes. I have also been a critic of how the Western press characterizes the changes coming about in Turkey. The fears expressed show little appreciation for this remarkable country and no understanding for its distinct form of Islam and its potential role in the modern world. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.

Several yeas ago I met the iconographer Symeon van Donkelaar. He had been traveling across Canada collecting samples of the earth from each region. It was part of a large project conceived in light of the United Nations declaration of 2008 as the International Year of Planet Earth. The exhibition that flowed from this work took each sample with its particular minerals and metals and, as artists have done since time immemorial, called forth their particular and unique colours and beauty.  In July, Symeon was invited by the Virgin Mary Anglican Church in Regina, Saskatchewan, to do a workshop on the writing of icons. We met in the church and discussed his “earth works”, his deep engagement of place and the spiritual meaning of the use of local colour born of the depth of the earth in his writing of icons. Symeon apprenticed with Fr. Nathaniel in a monastery in the United States and, over the last few years, has developed the Conestoga Iconographic Studio in Ontario. I welcome your thoughts on the various themes in this podcast and encourage you to visit davidgoa.ca and the website of the Conestoga Iconographic Studio at https://www.conestogaicons.com/. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact. (https://www.conestogaicons.com/) 18 July 2019

In November of 2018 I was invited to speak at the Second International Congress on Spiritual and Religious Care for those incarcerated in prisons. The Congress was sponsored by the Centre for Values at the University in Istanbul. My Turkish hosts asked me to speak about my approach to teaching in Canadian prisons, a matter I have written about in “The School of Joseph: Prison Meditations” which you can read on my website. Over an evening meal in a lovely Turkish restaurant close to the Marble Sea I sat across from Amjad Hussain, young, affable, and full of interest. We had a wide-ranging conversation with many surprises in it. At one point, embarrassed at only knowing a few words in Arabic and Turkish, I spoke one of the few phrases I know in Norwegian, my parents language: “kan du snukke norsk” (“Can you speak Norwegian.”) To my delightful surprise out poured the most beautify natural Norwegian I had heard in years. He was born in Askim, Norway, south of Oslo near the Swedish boarder and speaks the mother tongue I never learned. He grew up in this town of 15,000 people in the homeland of my parents. He is also fluent in his parent’s mother tongues, Urdu, Punjabi, as well as being an Arabic and Turkish speaker. Dr. Amjad M. Hussain is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Divinity at Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey. Previous to this post he was a Lecturer in Religious Studies at several universities in Wales. His many publications include the books, A Social History of Education in the Muslim World: From the Prophetic Era to Ottoman Times (2013), The Study of Religions: An Introduction (2015), The Muslim Creed: A Contemporary Theological Study (2016) and Islam for New Muslims: An Educational Guide (2018). He has also written a number of chapters for books and published numerous journal articles in the United Kingdom, United States, Malaysia, and Turkey. I welcome you to our conversation on Norway, Islam, and issues of religion and public life. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.

Welcome to In Conversation. In this conversation I have the pleasure of talking with Professor Cyril Hovorun a research fellow at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and at the Stockholm School of Theology. He is author of a number of substantial books on public and political theology including the recently published Political Orthodoxies: The Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced. I welcome you to our conversation on church and state and the challenges to the Orthodox churches posed by nationalism, fundamentalism and anti- Semitism in the post-Soviet period. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at davidgoa@telusplanet.net. In February 2014 in the central square in Kiev, the Maidan, we witnessed the Ukrainian Revolution. It was a rare occasion in the history of an Orthodox country. Priests and monks came out to support the people as they challenged political authorities. Professor Cyril Hovorun, a political insider, spoke out eloquently on this occasion. His analysis of the relationship between ecclesiastical leaders and political leaders, between church, state and society drew on his scholarship from Constantine through the Patristic period to the contemporary world. Fr. Cyril is a Patristic scholar and keen observer of how the culture wars in Eastern and Southern Europe turn into bloody conflicts. He focuses on the theological underpinnings of these wars that emerged with the fall of communism and the spiritual renewal of Orthodoxy. In Russia, Ukraine and other countries of Eastern Europe the Orthodox Church became an influential political protagonist. All to often religion is being politicized and weaponized, used in service to narrow nationalism and anti-Semitism. His work calls for a rethinking of the Orthodox doctrine of the Symphonia, the harmony between Emperor and Hierarch, State and Church. His analysis is singular in helping us understand the troubling movements unfolding in many Orthodox countries. His guidance is sorely needed for the church to find its better angels. Professor Hovorun is a research fellow at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and at the Stockholm School of Theology. He is author of a number of substantial books on public and political theology including the recently published Political Orthodoxies: The Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced. I welcome you to our conversation on church and state. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.

In this podcast I have the pleasure of talking with Professor Molly Worthan. She teaches history at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill focusing on the intellectual and religious history of North America. She is also the Director of the Honors Program, an opinion writer for the New York Times, Slate and other publication. Her superb book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism explores the intellectual history of American evangelicals and the culture wars since 1945.  A decade and a half ago I received an enquiry for an undergraduate student at Yale University. She was learning Russia and wanted to come to northern Alberta to spend the summer doing field research work in the Old Believer community near Athabasca. I first met this community in the 1970s shortly after they arrived. A bit later I spent sometime with my colleague the anthropologist David Scheffle who also did field research and published a book on the Old Believers. This community had its origins in Siberia to which their ancestors had been exiled following the reforms introduced to the Russian Orthodox Church by Patriarch Nikon in 1666. Some made their way into a remote region of China, live a reclusive life, and occasionally hunted Siberian tigers for European zoos. In order to avoid the reach of the communist government of China in the 1960s they moved again and eventually settled in Canada. It was not the sort of community I would readily suggest a young woman (or man for that matter) endeavour to engage.  I called the phone number on the correspondence and met Molly Worthen. She spoke easily about herself and her interests, mentioned growing up in Chicago, the city that entered my blood when I studied there in the 1960s. It was clear to me that she had the intellectual curiosity and formation, a spirit of hospitality and simple good judgment and determination suitable to her proposed work. Over the summer we got to know each other and her work in the Old Believer community flourished. That summer played a little role in Molly focusing her work on North American religious and intellectual history, particularly the ideas and culture of conservative Christianity. She is a professor of History at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Director of the Honors Program, an opinion writer for the New York Times, Slate and other publication. Her superb book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism explores the intellectual history of American evangelicals and the culture wars since 1945. I welcome you to our conversation on President Trump, the evangelicals and what is unfolding in America political culture. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.