Real Clear Science<\/a> when needed.<\/p>\nQ: How do you sleep?<\/p>\n
A: Deputies, colleagues, and co-editors help me do most of this. Joseph \u201cJoe\u201d Lawler handles the day-to-day with Real Clear Policy and Real Clear Religion is a thorough collaboration with Nicholas \u201cNick\u201d Hahn. Alex Berezow is the insomniac mad scientist behind Real Clear Science. I mention them here because they are sure to get name-checked from time to time. <\/p>\n
Q: Sounds like a busy schedule. Why are you making time for a blog?<\/p>\n
A: It is busy, but I\u2019ve always done a lot of writing for Real Clear and other outlets. Writing is a way of thinking. Forcing oneself to write regularly is a way of staying sharp. It is thus a good way of giving readers the best \u201cintelligent aggregation\u201d possible, because the product we are really selling is our best judgment.<\/p>\n
Q: You mentioned you went to CPAC. Are you a conservative?<\/p>\n
A: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Republican Party, but party membership doesn\u2019t mean much in the great state of Washington. Rush Limbaugh one day repeatedly called me a \u201cliberal\u201d on air. My Baptist minister father was flooded with calls from parishioners telling him he ought to call up Rush and set him straight. Dad wrote an e-mail and called Rush a liberal. I found the whole thing highly amusing.<\/p>\n
Q: Why amusing?<\/p>\n
A: It\u2019s consistent with my general outlook. One stock question that I will ask old friends and new enemies alike is: \u201cWhy do you get out of bed in the morning?\u201d Their off-the-cuff answers can tell you a lot about what animates them. I\u2019ve gotten answers from a general sense of duty to \u201chatred of the left\u201d to fear of being deported to Canada.<\/p>\n
Q: OK then, why do you get out of bed in the morning?<\/p>\n
A: Because I find life so very amusing.<\/p>\n
Q: You wrote \u201cmy Baptist minister father.\u201d Was that a way of drawing a distinction?<\/p>\n
A: Yes. He\u2019s Baptist, I\u2019m Catholic.<\/p>\n
Q: What\u2019s the story there?<\/p>\n
A: It\u2019s a long one. The shortest way of getting at it is to say when I was 13 the Baptist congregation we were at went through a very painful \u201cchurch split.\u201d Some of the pastors and about half of the members walked away to start a new church. I thought that was clearly a bad thing, but that presented a logic problem to my young mind. I was aware there had been this little thing called the Reformation. So I thought: this could be OK now and OK then or wrong now and wrong back then, but it didn\u2019t seem possible it could be a bad thing now but A-OK back in the day.<\/p>\n
Q: So you, a pastor\u2019s kid, joined a church that requires clerical celibacy?<\/p>\n
A: There always have and always will be PKs, of varying shades of legitimacy, but we\u2019re not the greatest idea. I often tell people that PKs know where all the bodies are buried. I could add \u201cliterally.\u201d We\u2019re too close and see too much too early. It becomes pretty hard to shock us with church scandals.<\/p>\n
Q: So why not just chuck God, religion, the whole metaphysical ball of wax?<\/p>\n
A: Tried that. It didn\u2019t take.<\/p>\n
Q: You were an atheist?<\/p>\n
A: No, I wanted to be an atheist. I just never could find a way to pretend God doesn\u2019t exist or that what we do here and now has no greater significance. Francis Schaeffer put it memorably. God is there and \u2014 in the long run, anyway \u2014 he is not silent.<\/p>\n
Q: What do you do for fun, when you\u2019re not being ponderous?<\/p>\n
A: Too many things. I bowl and go for long, meandering walks. Dirt races are fun. Just got a set of golf clubs and a ridiculously high powered bb gun. All the neighborhood crows are suddenly giving the house wide berth. Of course I read, for fun as well as profit, and go to a ridiculous number of movies. <\/p>\n
Q: What\u2019s your favorite movie?<\/p>\n
A: It\u2019s a tie between Tombstone<\/em> and My Fair Lady<\/em>. Val Kilmer\u2019s Doc Holiday and Rex Harrison\u2019s Henry Higgins are both immortal fictional characters.<\/p>\nQ: Real Clear Religion has been described as a \u201cMormon-interested website.\u201d What\u2019s your own take on Mormons?<\/p>\n
A: They\u2019re great!<\/p>\n
Q: Sarcasm?<\/p>\n
A: No I really have liked most of the Mormons I\u2019ve met and corresponded with and I find their religion deeply fascinating. It\u2019s the most ambitious religion I\u2019ve ever encountered.<\/p>\n
Q: So when are you going to convert?<\/p>\n
A: Oh, probably never. I think you get one conversion in life before you start to court absurdity and I\u2019ve already did that. Besides, my religious notions are pretty well fixed at this point \u2014 basically a Baptist-flavored Catholicism, a degree in Biblical Studies and an Irish temperament, and the Jeremy Lott prayer thrown in for good measure.<\/p>\n
Q: What in the world is the Jeremy Lott prayer?<\/p>\n
A: It goes like this: Dear God: I\u2019m wrong, you\u2019re right, I\u2019m going to bed.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Q: Why Jeremy Lott\u2019s Diary? A: So my readers will have something interesting to read on the train. Q: People still take the train? A: I did recently, all the way from Bellingham to DC. Q: What were you doing in DC? A: I went to cover the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1078,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,8,10,9,13,11,12],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-qa","tag-baptists","tag-catholics","tag-cpac","tag-mormons","tag-my-fair-lady","tag-real-clear","tag-tombstone"],"yoast_head":"\n
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