Hey everyone!

Hope everyone is having a fun summer.

Apologies for not writing more often. In addition to experiencing major changes to my personal life, including a new job for the thing I actually studied for in school (!), I had been preparing for a podcast episode with one of my good friends. Before saying more, I should take a step back.

Earlier this year, I dropped off one of my friends, Casey, off at his place. He and I had been talking a lot about religion generally and moral philosophy more specifically, given our mutual interest in the subjects and our mutual understanding in the importance of figuring out how to live a good life. I realize that I haven’t written much about what I believe to be true on these topics (spoiler alert: I consider myself to be a moral constructivist as articulated by Sean Carroll in his book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself), but I do intend to write a more comprehensive blog post on this topic some day.

Anyway, Casey had asked me as I parked in his driveway what I believed to be true on the topic of religion. In conversation with him, I had been repeatedly steel-manning (what is steel-manning?) the moral realist case presented by Sam Harris in his book The Moral Landscape, given (1) my understanding of Harris’ ideas, (2) the strength with which I perceived his arguments to be at the time, and (3) Casey’s sharp theistic mind. In any case, in spite of my steel-manning, it wasn’t totally clear to my friend what I believed to be true. This was entirely fair, given the fact that the position I was continually defending wasn’t quite my own.

In response to his question, I simply said something along the lines of “perhaps we should talk about this another time,” which prompted our conversation to end somewhat abruptly. There is a good chance that Casey was not entirely satisfied with this answer. I know I wasn’t!

We had a few more conversations on this topic since that happened, but he agreed to come on my podcast over the summer so we could have a discussion on these kinds of ideas. We recorded our conversation earlier this month, and I have yet to begin working on the editing and post-production. Our conversation was the longest one that I recorded so far (about three hours), and we talked about politics, religion, moral philosophy, apparent contradictions in Christianity, and much more!

After talking about this conversation with my friends both before and after recording it, I can safely say that, by a significant margin, this is the most anticipated episode I have recorded so far. I am hoping to release this episode in the coming month or so, so stay tuned!

There are a few things that I want to say about the conversation in retrospect, but I will save these thoughts for my blog post in which I announce the episode’s publication.

All this to say, preparing for this conversation has taken up a lot of my own (already limited) free time, given the degree of preparedness that I wanted to bring to the table and also my not wanting to get crushed on my own podcast, which mostly explains my lack of writing in recent months.

To subscribe to my YouTube channel to be alerted when the episode is published, click here. Otherwise, I recommend following me on Instagram or on WordPress to know exactly when the episode is available.

I would like the quality of the video to reflect the effort I put into preparing for the conversation, so I highly appreciate your patience as I work on the episode’s post-production! I look forward to publishing my first public conversation/debate.

Jo