Ana Levy-Lyons: Here’s what I think. I think that the reason why I was successful as a Unitarian minister was because I myself was practicing as a Jew, and that was a well that I could draw from even when I didn’t explicitly speak in Jewish terms. That was my own kind of spiritual foundation that was allowing what I offered to have some more depth.

Mark Oppenheimer: Greetings and welcome to Arc: The Podcast. We’re the podcast of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. I’m your host Mark Oppenheimer, and I want to tell you a story. I’m Jewish, as many of you know, but growing up I almost never ever went to Jewish religious services. I went to some cousins bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, and one time a friend of mine from the Montessori school that I was sent to for grades two through four, which is a terrible episode in my life and I’ll tell you more about it some other time. But one time a friend from Pioneer Valley Montessori School invited me to sleep over at his house on a Saturday night and then on Sunday morning to go to Sunday school with him, to Hebrew school at Temple Sinai in Springfield, Massachusetts. So I went to exactly one hour of Hebrew school in my entire childhood and maybe a dozen Jewish religious services.

But that’s not the story. The story is that I actually went to a lot of religious services. They just weren’t Jewish more than anything else. They were Unitarian. And the reason is that my two best friends in childhood were Unitarians. One of them was the son of the local Unitarian minister at First Unitarian Universalist Society of Springfield, or something like that. And the other one was the son of a very, very active and prominent member. His mom served on all of the different committees and was one of the major volunteers, one of the church ladies of the Unitarian Church in Springfield. So my connection to Unitarianism actually goes back to when I was 4, 5, 6 years old.

I went to services that my friend’s dad was leading, where he was the pastor. I would stop by his office at the Unitarian Church with my friends so that we could ask for a few dollars to ride our bicycles to the Friendly’s at the Long Meadow Shops in Long Meadow, Massachusetts, and get some ice cream cones. His dad’s church was pretty close to the shopping center where we could get ice cream, and I just generally had cultural conversants with Unitarians. When my friend’s dad moved to a different church in upstate New York, I would visit my friend sometimes at his dad’s place. His parents were divorced and his dad had gone to upstate New York, and I would go to that church and I remember meeting people there, and it was good fun.

And so I got to know the Unitarians as a sort of not Christian anymore, sort of post-Christian, liberal, lefty, progressive religious community. I remember them talking a lot about the inherent worth and dignity of every person. That seemed to be the mantra that you heard at any Unitarian congregation wherever you went, was we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every human person. I remember there was a lot of candle lighting. There seemed to be chalice and candles. And in general, I got the sense that this was the NPR tote bag set at church on Sunday morning. That is to say, if you were from that sort of New England lefty, progressive, NPR, slash folk music, slash childcare cooperative, slash you wore Wallabees or if you were female you wore Espadrilles, slash L.L. Bean, slash beat up station wagon, slash Whole Foods before there was Whole Foods so maybe you went to Bread and Circus in North Hampton–that community, and you wanted to do something spiritual, you weren’t entirely post religious, you went to the Unitarian Universalist Church, the UUs, the Unitarians.

As it happened, I ended up writing a chapter of my dissertation in grad school about the Unitarians because I discovered, or was one of the people to discover, that the first openly gay minister within any mainline denomination was a guy named James Stoll, who was a Unitarian minister, and he came out as gay in 1969, and I found his sermon in which he kind of announced his queerness, or as they would’ve said back then, his homosexuality. And that became an article of mine that became a chapter of my dissertation on religion in the sixties.

And so I became something of a scholarly expert, I guess you’d say on the Unitarians. All of this means that over the years I’ve been evangelized by Unitarians, I’ve been invited to their churches, I’ve had people say to me, “Well, you know, you can still be Jewish and be Unitarian. You should come join us because anything can be Unitarian.” Right? Unitarianism is sort of the catch-all progressive vibe, so join the church, and I’ve always resisted because it doesn’t feel like home to me because the older I get, the more I realize that I’m a Jew and religiously that’s what I am and nothing else. And I’ve had sort of, I don’t want to say mixed feelings about the you the UUs, but interesting and complicated feelings because in some ways it was my first church and in other ways it’s definitely not my church today, even though as they say, some of my best friends are Unitarians, which in my case is actually true.

All of which brings us to Ana Levy-Lyons. She is a former Unitarian minister of a very big and successful congregation in Brooklyn, and she’s now in rabbinic school. She also is ancestrally Jewish, but didn’t know that until she was in her twenties. So as you can imagine, this whole story is wacky and weird. I cannot be more thrilled that she sent me a direct message through Substack and said, “I think we have a lot to talk about.” That’s how I learned who she was. I then read her forthcoming book, The Secret Despair of The Secular Left.

I now subscribe to her Substack newsletter, and I find her incredibly compelling as someone who saw everything that was great about and then also felt that for her own Jewish reasons she had to leave it behind. Her argument is totally summed up in the title of her book, The Secret Despair of The Secular Left, but we went deeper. The conversation is one of my favorites, I hope you’ll have a listen.

Later in the show, we’re going to talk about Silicon Valley companies that have been named for Tolkien characters. We’re going to do some celebrity birthdays. We’re going to do some religious holidays. We’re going to have lots of fun, but before we do, here’s the first part of my interview with Reverend, Rabbi, or Reverend and future Rabbi, or past Reverend future Rabbi Ana Levy-Lyons.
Ana Levy-Lyons, welcome to Arc with Mark.

ALL: Thanks so much, Mark. It’s good to be here.

MO: We met because you reached out to me on Substack and maybe, I don’t know if you’d seen something I wrote or what, but you said you dug my stuff and you had a book coming out and we talked and your story’s amazing.

ALL: Thanks, I guess.

MO: So I want to get to your book. I want to get to The Secret Despair of the Secular Left, which I think is a really interesting and important book and says a lot of things that I happen to agree with in a way that no one has said them before. But before we get there, we do have to hear your story, which starts way back in childhood and I think is, more than most people’s upbringings, relevant to the book that you’re writing today. And so I hope you can take us back to your childhood. Tell us who your parents were, where you grew up, and how you were raised both religiously and otherwise.

ALL: I grew up mostly in New Jersey, suburb of New York City, but before that third grade, I had lived all over the place. I was actually born in France and had kind of moved several times, grew up in New Jersey. My parents had been divorced when I was young. They were both Jewish by heritage, but had sort of left their Jewish roots behind. And I grew up not even knowing that I was Jewish. It was a kind of very conventional suburban upbringing. We were kind of culturally Christian, but definitely secular. And I played music. I went to college. I went into the sort of tech industry of the dot-com boom in San Francisco. I played music for a while, and all of these worlds that I was in were completely secular worlds. So that was my life. I had always felt a kind of longing for something more, something more spiritual, something more grounded and rooted, but it was sort of vague.

I had explored different religious traditions, but nothing, it didn’t feel like anything was mine. These were foreign things. I was kind of outside the kind of scraping at the window of something that I didn’t quite know what it was. In my, maybe late teens, early twenties, I learned that I was Jewish and it made a lot of sense of me. To me, there was a way in which it was like a puzzle piece that fell into place, but I didn’t really know what to do with it because I didn’t know the first thing about Judaism, I went to some services at synagogues and it felt really cool. It felt sort of familiar in a way, but also really foreign. So I didn’t really do anything with that knowledge immediately.

MO: Can I stop you there and ask how did you find out you were Jewish?

ALL: I’ll tell you how I found out on my mom’s side. We were with a cousin or something, and he just casually said something like, “Oh, does such and such happen because you’re Jewish?” And I said, “I’m not Jewish.” And he said, “Of course you’re Jewish. Mom, are we Jewish?” And she said, “Yeah, well, you know, Jewish heritage.” For her, it was not something she was actively trying to hide as much as it was something that didn’t feel important to her. I think that if you live in a Christian world with a Christian understanding of what religion is, if you don’t “believe” in, and I’m using air quotes here with the word believe, if you don’t sort of “believe” in the religious tenets, then you are not a member of that religious community. That’s a kind of Christian framing for what religion is. So to my mother, she wasn’t hiding something from me. She wasn’t Jewish because she didn’t sort of believe in Judaism.

MO: This is one of those moments where as an interviewer, you think if we go down this path, it could easily hijack the whole hour that we have together. And I really do want to talk about your book, but I also think that to some extent an interviewer is the listener’s representative. And I have to ask the questions that are going to be plaguing them. And I think a lot of listeners are going to think, wait a second, to grow up Jewish in New Jersey, to be living in New Jersey, which has a lot of Jews, you weren’t in Montana, you were in New Jersey, surely you went to school with Jews. There were Jews around. There were Jews in popular culture. To not know, I think your mother must have told some lies along the way. I mean, the idea that it just hadn’t come up over 18 or 19 years of raising children is not believable to me.

ALL: I think that’s a good point, but I still don’t think that she thought that she was lying, because I think that she thought that being Jewish was a matter of belief because she had adopted a Christian-based understanding of what it means to be of a certain religion. So I think that she felt that she was not Jewish, and therefore I was not Jewish.

MO: So let me ask a different question, which is in my family, where my parents were always telling stories about their parents and their grandparents and how they grew up. I mean, it was kind of a topic. It would’ve been impossible for it not to come up, even if they shared that understanding, and I understand the understanding you’re talking about, that it’s a matter of ascribing to certain beliefs, and they didn’t believe the Hebrew Bible and Torah and Tanakh and Talmud were sacred texts. So okay, you’re not Jewish, fine. But was there no discussion of family lore, of who your people were, of when they came over from whatever the old country was? That wasn’t how your family–

ALL: No, and this is part of what I talk about in my book, that there’s a sense in secular modernity in general, that we are self-created, that we’re actually not beholden to our past, and that stories about our childhood are sort of interesting, they might have some psychological value to explain kind of aspects of who you are today, but they don’t form who you are in a deep, existential way. And so I think those were not the stories. The stories were the stories of the making of oneself, the shaping of oneself into what you want to be.

MO: But also personality wise, your mom and dad must have not been people who sat around telling yarns about their childhood.

ALL: That’s definitely true. Right. Yeah.

MO: I mean, that’s interesting. And it strikes me as sad.

ALL: And that’s part of what I feel like we are losing today. I feel like we’re more and more losing the connection to our past and our childhood and the richness of the lineage that we come from in favor of this kind of chosen identity. In so many ways we choose our family, the chosen family is a thing. Our sense of gender now is based on an individual sense of who you are that’s not connected to your body necessarily in today’s understanding of it. So yeah, we’re just becoming much more sort of atomized beings.

MO: Okay, so you’re an undergraduate at Brown, and a cousin kind of tips you off and you do a little probing and discover that ancestrally, you’re Jewish on both sides completely, back to Sinai or wherever. How did you go from there to being a Unitarian minister?

ALL: I had always felt from long before I knew I was Jewish, I had felt this yearning for religious life, for being kind of immersed in a more spiritual world, a more rooted world. And so when I learned that I was Jewish, I wanted to dive into that. And I even thought, “Wow, maybe I could be a rabbi and I could be in that world altogether.” But I didn’t read Hebrew, I didn’t know anything about Judaism. I couldn’t just from that place go to rabbinical school right away. So I just kind of tucked that information away, and I did other things, but eventually that longing for religious life came back. And so I figured, well, I can’t be a rabbi, but I can go to grad school and study religion academically and become a professor and teach, so I did that. I went to University of Chicago Divinity School, and I did my first year there on the academic track, and I just hated it.

Just the academic study of religion was, to me, missing the entire point. And University of Chicago Div School is especially cynical about religion, it’s mostly about debunking religious claims. So I just realized after that first year that there was no way I was going to actually spend the next seven years of my life sitting in the library at the University of Chicago. And I had known about Unitarian Universalism, and I knew that it was very open. I knew that it was not Christian because they had, for the listeners who don’t know what it is, it emerged out of Protestant Christianity, but it dropped its Christian identity in the sixties. So it had some innocuous principles about kind of human rights and being good to each other. And it felt like something that I could kind of shape into whatever I wanted it to be, and it wouldn’t be a conflict with being Jewish.

MO: Can I just interrupt to add a little bit more about the UU tradition, which was the first tradition I knew anything about because growing up my best friend was the son of the local Unitarian Universalist minister in Springfield, Massachusetts. It would be interesting for a lot of people to know that the Unitarians came out of a branch of the Congregationalists who decided that the Trinity was false, so they believed in the unity of God, there was God, but there was no Holy Spirit, and the Son was just a man. So they were Unitarians, not Trinitarians. And the Universalists were a sect that believed in universal salvation. So you can see how both of those had the seeds of a progressive theology in them, and they merged in, I want to say the early sixties, ’62 or something.
ALL: Yeah, I think ’62.

MO: I wasn’t aware there was ever an official—was there an official decision to cease being Christian? Because the old style Unitarians would’ve said, although Jesus was not divine, his message was uniquely important. He was the number one prophet. And at some point they stopped saying that. All the prophets, Mohamed and Buddha, and they’re all good. Right?

ALL: That’s right. That’s right. I don’t know if they ever made sort of the negative claim that we are no longer Christian.

MO: It just kind of wilted away.

ALL: But the statements of values sort of dropped any reference to Jesus as savior or any of the sort of Christian, specifically Christian doctrine.

MO: So there you are in I guess the nineties, or early aughts maybe, deciding to become a UU minister.

ALL: No, this would’ve been around 2005.

MO: And the plan was I’ll get a pulpit, I’ll be a preacher.

ALL: That was the plan.

MO: And it went well.

ALL: It went really well. It went really well, except that I continued my Jewish journey at the same time. Personally, I married a Jewish man, we had kids, we moved to New York City for a job that I had at a Unitarian church on the Upper East Side, and I never sort of figured out where the depth in Unitarian Universalism was. I had been hoping that I could sort of find it, but I didn’t. Meanwhile, I was discovering this beautiful world in Judaism. We joined Romemu, which is a Jewish renewal community in Manhattan. And so there started to be this growing dissonance between what I was sort of teaching and leading on Sunday mornings and my personal and family religious life, and the services I was attending on Friday nights and Saturday mornings.

MO: When you say that you kept hoping to find the depths in Unitarianism here, I want to be really careful because of course there are people who are Unitarian who feel that their tradition is deep and fulfilling and soulful and does everything that they want it to do, and that it is, for them, the truth. Or it is the journey. It’s the right way to ask the question.

And yet, as you argue in your book and on your substack and as you talk about there is a risk with very liberal religion, and I don’t mean politically liberal, but I mean kind of theologically very loose, where all truth claims seem open or relative. And where I would also say about unitarianism, the ritual is different from church to church. There’s no sense of here’s the prayer book or are the important hymns. And you can correct me at any point if I’m wrong. I mean, you certainly know it better than I.

There is the risk, some people feel, that if anything goes, then it’s hard to find the kind of content there. And I guess what I’d love for you to do is maybe make the strongest form of that critique. I certainly know people who flee Unitarianism and say it was just NPR tote bags on Sunday morning. It was just liberal politics. Maybe there were some songs, there was a food drive, but there was actually very little interest in Scripture, in any kind of tradition over time in raising the next generation to believe stuff, et cetera. And then one could imagine the pushback, and you were in the pulpit being Unitarian for a long time, being the affirmative form of it, and the pushback would say something different. They would say, “No, this is all the richness you need, and anything else is too dogmatic.” And, I guess, could you maybe explain that tension a little bit? For people who don’t know about liberal religion, liberal Christianity, Unitarianism. Why would someone feel that the depths weren’t there and what would the response be?

ALL: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of today’s Unitarian Universalism is a very understandable reaction to the kind of sense of oppressive, or even traumatic, experiences that people had with traditional religions. And so there’s been kind of, in my view, overcorrection where because sacred texts contain elements that are patriarchal, violent, homophobic, all of these things that have been really harmful to people, we drop sacred texts altogether, or we say, we’ll just pick the parts that we like from sacred texts of many different world traditions, but there is no text that is ours. So we don’t have to wrestle with the difficult parts, we just reject them. So sacred text, same thing with religious practices. In Unitarian universalism, there are no shared communal practices because, again, religious practices have been oppressive to some people at some times. And so there are no shared practices. So no shared text, no shared practices, very little in the way of shared rituals.

There is sort of the ritual of the worship service itself, which has things like a chalice lighting, and it has the form of a Protestant church service, but there are no actual rituals, like holiday rituals that would be the equivalent of Yom Kippur or Pesach, where it’s actually in the cycle of the year, you’re able to use in an ancient spiritual technology to grow spiritually and to work through the pains and losses of our world to grapple with the problems of evil. Right? There is no real holiday cycle except for the sort of vestigial Christian cultural holidays of Christmas and Easter. In the name of freedom from the oppressive aspects of religion, it’s dropped anything that could kind of ground it in something real, deep, ancient, connected.

MO: So the people who are getting the most out of it, what are they getting out of it? Why are they going?

ALL: Community is the number one reason people say that they are there. And that’s real, that’s real. In talking about these, kind of, what I see as the deficiencies of Unitarian Universalism, I do not mean to diminish the value that UU communities have for the people who join them.

MO: In your experience, are they what the anthropologists would call “thick communities”? In that, and that word can mean a lot, so what I mean by that in this case is that people are kind of all in, that it’s identity making. And I guess I would also ask, are they doing the stuff that people at, say, a really good synagogue, or really tight knit Catholic diocese are doing, like bringing each other meals when they’re in the hospital, or after a mother gives birth, or really walking through life’s milestones together? Are they all in that way in what you’ve seen?

ALL: I think they try really hard to do that with different levels of success in different congregations.

I mean, this is most of religious life and modernity in general, even in Jewish and Christian, right? Religion is not this kind of completely immersive, kind of life organizing thing.

MO: There is this conundrum, which is that the more theologically doctrinaire a religion is, the easier time it seems that its congregations have building really tight-knit community.

ALL: Yes. Right.

MO: Why is that? Why can’t liberal religion with really kind of open-ended theology foster really tight-knit community? Or why is it harder?

ALL: Because liberal religion is all about individual freedom, and it’s the idea of obligation is anathema. So the idea that we have obligations to our community, much less obligation to God or our tradition, anything beyond ourselves or our family is a little hard to stomach.

MO: Why did you leave your church two years ago?

ALL: Well, that’s a long story, but it was time. I had wanted to leave for a long time. I had started rabbinical school about four years ago, and it was time.

MO: In your book, The Secret Despair of the Secular Left, you tell a few stories about times when you felt that the Unitarian tradition you were working out of didn’t give certain people the resources they needed in really difficult times. I’m thinking of the story you tell about the woman whose husband is on life support and has to die, and that was a pretty powerful story for you. Can you talk about that?

ALL: Sure. Yeah. This was early in my ministry career and I was called to the hospital because a woman was…her husband had had a cardiac arrest and was on life support, and he was not ever going to be able to recover. When I arrived at the hospital, that had already been determined. They had determined that they were going to take him off life support and allow him to die, and she had accepted that idea. What was startling to me was that she told me that the doctors had said to her that she should not be in his room when it happens because the doctors told her it might take him a while to die and it would be hard for her to watch and he wasn’t conscious anyway, so it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be aware of it. I was shocked by this advice. I was shocked that she was willing to take it.

And I also felt helpless as a Unitarian Universalist minister to be able to do anything about it. I had no grounds, no theological grounds on which to tell her that she ought to do anything other than what she wanted to do because there is no particular tradition around death and dying in Unitarian Universalism. There was just my personal opinion about it, which was just me, right? It had no authority. So instead of telling her what I thought she ought to do, I asked her what she wanted to do. Because in the language of sort of secular modernity, the idea of choice, personal choice, is something that does have real teeth, real authority. So I asked her, “Do you want to be in his room? Because it’s your choice, you know?” And she said, “No, the doctors are probably right. They kind of know what’s best, and it probably would be too hard to watch.” So in that world, the doctors have authority, the doctors are the experts and the clergy person is not. So I gave her the next best option, and I offered for me to go and sit in with him while he died. And she very, very gratefully accepted that idea. So she went home and I sat with her husband. I had never met him before, and I held his hand while he died over the next few hours.

And I remember one of the things that I wrote in the book was that when he died, it was so obvious, the difference between somebody who’s unconscious and somebody who’s actually dead. But this idea that the doctors had told her that he’s not conscious, and so he’s not going to be aware of anything. He’s not really there. That didn’t feel true. So I went back to the church and I spoke with my supervisor, the senior minister of the congregation, about what had happened, and he could tell that I was uncomfortable with how that had all gone down, and he assured me that I had done the right thing. And he said, the most important thing is to not make them feel guilty.

We were talking before about obligation, that the idea of obligation is really difficult, I think, in the liberal world. So the idea that she may have had an obligation to her husband, the important thing is to not make her feel guilty.

MO: And you feel that if you had been a rabbi with a congregant, or a priest with a congregant, at that moment, you would’ve had the authority to say, “I think you should be with your spouse while he dies.”

ALL: I think so. I think so. Most religious traditions have clear protocols and rituals around death. And of course, you can’t be required to be with someone when they die because it’s not always possible, but certainly if you have the option to be with them and accompany them in this moment, and I think in religious traditions also, there’s a sense that we have a consciousness, a soul, you can call it a soul, a spirit. We have a consciousness that transcends the body, or even the brain. And so for a doctor to say that the person isn’t there, that’s not a religious or spiritual truth. And from a religious perspective, I could say to somebody, “No, his soul is still there and his soul is going to be there.” And in Jewish tradition, you can’t even leave the body alone once it’s dead. You have to stay with the body until it’s buried. So there’s a sense that the soul, and the body, and the consciousness are much more integrated than perhaps modern science would have us believe.

MO: And there’s also the fact that it might’ve been good for her, not just for him, to be accompanied in the journey to death, but she might’ve felt better.

ALL: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

MO: Is part of what was going on that you didn’t yet feel the authority as a pastor that you might’ve felt 10 years later to say, “I think you’ll wish you’d been there. Why don’t you go sit with him? You’ll be glad you did.”

ALL: Yeah, I probably should have done that.

MO: I don’t mean to make you feel guilty now.

ALL: No matter what you do, don’t make me feel guilty.

MO: Right.

ALL: No, I think I probably could have said that. Although the doctors were very–

MO: Pushy.

ALL: They were very pushy about this. I even had to kind of work to convince them to let me go sit with him. So to first convince her with her kind of wavering uncertainty about it, and then have to have her go against what the doctor was recommending, that would’ve been a tough lift, I think.

MO: And then you also talk about the uncertainty that some of your congregants had around cremation, which I didn’t realize until I read your book has become the secular norm. I guess it’s seen as more environmentally friendly, though I don’t know why it would be since it involves burning fuels to cremate the body as opposed to just digging a hole and putting the body there.

ALL: Yeah, it’s not. I remember one in particular that I talk about in the book was this guy who called me. I didn’t know him. I think he had been a member of the congregation previously, but he wanted me to do a memorial service, and he was talking about his wife who is going to be dying soon, and he was planning to cremate her body. But as we were talking, it came out that he was actually a little bit uncomfortable with that idea. He himself was Catholic, and had had meaningful experience with his grandfather’s burial and the casket and going to the grave site. His wife had been Jewish, and in Jewish tradition you don’t cremate the body. And so there was this little nagging feeling that he had that maybe cremation was not the right choice, but the power of the secular norms of our culture, I think particularly in more progressive circles, was much stronger than that little nagging feeling that he had.

MO: Hey, friends, if you are enjoying this episode, please make sure to subscribe and rate and review us. We’re on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. In fact, if you subscribe to us across all three platforms, I will send you a pencil. No, I don’t know, we don’t have our swag yet, but when we do, there will be rewards for people who subscribe to us across all three platforms and giving us lots of stars and giving us good ratings really does help in getting word of the show out there, it helps in the algorithm, and we would be most grateful.

Coming up in future weeks, we’re going to be talking with Rich Cohen, one of my favorite journalists. His latest book is Murder in the Dollhouse about the Jennifer Dulos murder in New Canaan, Connecticut. We’re going to be talking with the writer Paul Kings North, and we’re going to be talking with the other Mark Oppenheimer, the South African barrister with the ponytail. I’m the Mark Oppenheimer without the ponytail. So much good stuff. You definitely don’t want to miss your biweekly injection of Arcness, so subscribe to Arc: The Podcast.

Over at arcmag.org we have posted some terrific stuff lately. That, of course, is the print magazine, so to speak, it’s not on paper, but print on the web that this podcast is the companion to. And at arcmag.org, our favorite story of the past week is “The Jesus Loving Rabbi of Litchfield County” about the Messianic Jew who is pastoring Lyman Beecher’s old congregational church up in northwest Connecticut. It’s a crazy story, and the terrific Gabby Deutch went to Litchfield, Connecticut to get the details. We have an essay “Where are all the anti-gambling Christians?” by Jonathan Daniel Cohen, who writes about the fact that the evangelical community is theoretically anti-gambling, but in practice doesn’t seem to be talking about it much, and why is that? We have a review of Paul Elie’s new book about art and religion in the 1980s and so much more. Check us out at arcmag.org. That’s A-R-C-M-A-G.org. And now, back to my interview with Ana Levy-Lyons.

We are talking a lot about your leaving Unitarianism and moving into Jewish spiritual leadership. You’re currently in rabbinic school, but I also want to ask a little bit more about the end of your time, your last few years in Unitarianism, as you began to feel like there wasn’t enough depth there or enough ritual resources, did you fight back against that a little bit? Did you try to create some, did you try to persuade some of your congregants that maybe they wanted to do this or that ritual from whatever tradition their ancestors had come from? Was there a time where you were in a fruitful tension where you thought, I can infuse this Unitarian church in Brooklyn with some of the ruach that Jews have, or some of the piety that Catholics have, or whatever?

ALL: I was trying to do that the entire time that I was a UU minister. I tried introducing Sabbath practice. I drew from biblical tradition a lot, so it’s not forbidden to use the Scriptures. So I did, and I would do a sermon series where I would preach once a month, so I did one on the 10 Commandments, which actually became my first book. I sort of brought in Jewish Torah as much as I could. I had a group that did a version of the Schmita year with me.

MO: Where you leave the land fallow, don’t till the land for a year, right.
ALL: Exactly, exactly. It’s sort of a release for the land, and we kind of expanded it to be a release for ourselves and for each other. So there were lots of ways. I even tried once to institute a thing where we could leave cell phones outside the sanctuary when we came in. We had a whole system where people could put their cell phone in an envelope, and it was all alphabetical and everything.

MO: How’d that go?

ALL: Well, the first time we tried it, like 50 people did it, and I said, “Okay, this is great. That’s a really good start.” And then the second time we tried it, maybe 40 people did it, and then 30 people.

MO: It got worse.

ALL: And then, oh, yeah, it got worse over time. And here’s what I think, think that the reason why I was successful as a Unitarian minister was because I myself was practicing as a Jew, and that was a well that I could draw from, even when I didn’t explicitly speak in Jewish terms. That was my own kind of spiritual foundation that was allowing what I offered to have some more depth.

But at the same time, a lot of those efforts that I made were a little bit misguided, and I haven’t thought about this in a while, but I remember that when I was a kid, I really wanted a horse and I wanted to be able to ride a horse and jump horses over jumps. And of course, buying me a horse was not really in the cards for my family. But what my dad did for me, very lovingly, is we had a dog and he built a dog size set of jumps and tried to get the dog to jump over these jumps, which the dog was good natured enough to do this.

MO: My dogs would not be.

ALL: They would not?

MO: They would rebel, it would be hopeless.

ALL: But of course, it wasn’t really satisfying because a dog is never going to be a horse.

MO: A dog is not horse.

ALL: And so my attempt to make Unitarians into Jews was kind of like that, right? It was like, I really shouldn’t be trying to make them into something that they’re not. I should be loving them exactly as they are. So I tried to do that too.

MO: In reading your book, I also realized that one of the important things that happened to you was that you had a profound mystical experience, and it was at the end of an hour of yoga. And, tell me if I’m wrong, but my sense is that that opened you up to God talk and to metaphysics and the idea there was something more in a way that maybe made it increasingly untenable to be in a tradition that was so anti-God, anti-theistic. Am I overstating the importance of the yoga experience?

ALL: I think that was one of many experiences that have kind of opened my eyes to just the incredible, just all the dimensions of reality that we only kind of scrape the surface of in our daily life.

MO: Tell that story. What happened to you?

ALL: So I was in a yoga class, I think I was in divinity school at that time, this was grad school, and it was after the class when we were lying in Shavasana, which is where you just kind of lie flat on the ground.

MO: Corpse pose.

ALL: Corpse pose. Yes, exactly. And I started to have this sense that all of my sort of constriction, all the things that I didn’t like about myself, the painful places in me, the self blame, all of that was kind of like this gunk, this black gunk that was sort of covering my body, but that it wasn’t me. And I started to have this sense of this light that was sort of above me and in front of me, almost like it was projected on a screen, a white light. I mean, it sounds so cliche, but it was this white light, and it sort of got bigger and bigger, and then it entered my body and I could feel it as heat. I was physically sweating. I was filled with this white hot light, and I had this sense that this is what I really am, this is me. All of that other stuff is actually not, and this was my true essence, and that was it.

MO: That sounds amazing. I want that.

ALL: Yeah.

MO: Totally want that.

ALL: It was very brief, of course. Then I started thinking about it and, “Oh, isn’t this cool?” and “I wonder how long this is going to last for,” and “I wonder if this means I’m enlightened now,” and of course you have any of those thoughts and it kills it right away. But it was a moment that I sort of touched into that larger reality.

MO: And there have been others?

ALL: There have.

MO: Are any of them related to your Jewish practice?

ALL: One of them was on Yom Kippur. Yeah.

MO: So you left your Unitarian church. Do you still think of yourself as a Unitarian, or are you now just a boring old Jew?

ALL: I never thought of myself as a Unitarian. It was always a career for me, but it was not ever an identity.

MO: It’s so interesting. And it’s not as if your Jewish heritage would be a problem, half the Unitarian ministers out there grew up Jewish or Catholic, it seems to me, and a lot of them buy in. It becomes their full identity. But you were standing on the outside looking in.

ALL: Yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of people will say, “I’m a Jewish UU,” right.

MO: Oh, come on, I hope they say Jewnitarian.

ALL: A Jewnitarian, that’s another way to say it, yes. But that to me never felt quite right because although I didn’t disagree with any of the principles of Unitarian Universalism, the UU part of it didn’t feel additive. It’s like everything that you can find in Unitarian Universalism you can also find in Judaism. So I know that’s a really harsh thing to say, but I don’t think that it’s an improvement on any of the existing religions, religious traditions, particularly Christianity. It comes out of Christianity, but it doesn’t really add, it just subtracts.

MO: What a lot of people would say, I think, is that I liked Christianity for the holidays, and some of the hymns were beautiful and stuff, but I couldn’t handle the texts if read literally, and now I don’t have to worry about them. Now this always strikes me as temperamentally very foreign to me because I’m not a literalist, I have no problem singing things in languages I don’t understand, or saying prayers that I don’t agree with literally. My whole world is seen through a sort of gauzy haze of metaphor. I just don’t put much stock in literalism.

But a lot of Unitarians, and I would say this about a lot of Quakers I know who have left other traditions for what they see Quakerism as now, which is not historical Quakerism but what it’s become, is that for some people, they can’t be in a tradition, or hate being in a tradition, that requires them to occasionally say things, or listen reverently as someone else says things that strike them as wrong, and so they want to go to a place that is cleansed of anything that might be said, preached, or read that seems obviously wrong because it’s homophobic, because it’s misogynist, because it’s racist, because it’s 2000 years old. So they want a kind of safety from that, and therefore willing to discard really everything pre-1960 or whatever, because it was all tinged with bigotries and biases that we don’t hold anymore.

ALL: Right, there is a kind of intellectual integrity that people want to maintain, and I respect that.

MO: And I think for some people there’s an almost erotic of intellectual integrity. In other words, what I get from really, really beautiful liturgy, or what someone else might get from feeling that they’re communing with the ancestors that, I mean, I always say Torah is this 2000 year old book club that we just keep doing, and isn’t that gorgeous? That kind of erotic, or romance, or attachment, or infatuation is felt by some people when they feel they’re in intellectual integrity, right? It’s hard for me to imagine. I think it strikes me as a fairly boring thing to attach to, but I have to imagine that people who go to a Unitarian church week, after week, after week feel that there’s something exalted about living in that kind of progressive, intellectualized integrity.

ALL: Yeah, they must. I can’t relate to that.

MO: So you’ve written this book The Secret Despair of the Secular Left, which makes the case that secular modernity, shorn of ritual and traditions and liturgies and communities is not working for a lot of people. This strikes me as correct. I think your way of talking about it, your anecdotes, your stories, your diagnosis, which comes largely from a Jewish perspective now of how we’re embodied, of how we’re carnal, of how we have peoplehood, but we also have a kind of embodied soul. I think it’s dead on and very powerful for people who are not Unitarian and not Jewish. I am curious if you have a prescription for people.

ALL: Yeah. Well, I was afraid you would ask that. It’s really, really hard because these secular life ways that we’re all sort of entangled with and live with are so deep. Changing one thing is dependent on changing something else, which is dependent on changing something else, which is dependent on changing the first thing. So we’re all kind of entangled, entangled in this.

MO: Right, try keeping the Sabbath when your kids need to go to soccer practice. I mean, good luck to you, right?

ALL: Yeah.

MO: So you write about that.

ALL: Exactly. Exactly. So I’ll give you a real life example of this. My husband is a type one diabetic and he uses an insulin pump, and there was a new kind of pump. So the insulin pump allows you to, it’s like a little computer, and it’s this little device that you have to carry on you all the time, and it’s a little computer and it allows you to control the insulin that you give yourself. So they came out with a new version of this pump that you control from your phone. And so the pump itself is much, much smaller. You don’t need to have the whole computer and the screen housed on the pump, and so that’s much more convenient. You’re going to have your phone with you anyway. So he had to make this choice of do I want this smaller pump, which I can then control from my phone, but which then means that I have to have my phone with me for my survival all the time.

MO: That’s heavy.

ALL: I have to sleep with it next to me. I can’t ever decide that I’m going to take Shabbat without my phone. So that’s a kind of decision that I feel like our modern consumerist society would just be like, oh, that’s a no-brainer. I can have a smaller pump and just control it from my phone. So done.

MO: It’s so heavy.

ALL: But that’s exactly the kind of decision that prevents you from making more liberating decisions later about how you want to interact with your technology.

MO: Ana Levy-Lyons, this has been awesome. I have six or seven lightning round quick questions for you.

ALL: Oh, boy.

MO: Are you ready?

ALL: I’ll try.

MO: Okay. So do you believe in God? And if so, what does that mean?

ALL: I experience God. It’s not really an intellectual belief, but I experience God that moves in my life and through my life, and that is that white light, that core of myself that I have experienced occasionally.

MO: How do you support yourself financially?

ALL: I’m in the process of recreating a career, but I’m basically working as a ghost writer and a developmental editor, and I do public speaking and sometimes guest preaching in UU congregations and teach classes. I’m teaching a class through my Jewish learning, so cobbling together a sort of self-employed life as a teacher. And I do one-on-one spiritual work with people.

MO: Right on. If you could have had any other career realistically, not like being Aquaman or an Olympic sprinter, but something you could have done if you’d made different choices at age 20, what would it have been?

ALL: For a while, I was working on a music career, and I think I would do that. I was a singer-songwriter. I love writing music. I still do some writing of music, and that’s kind of the path not taken for me.

MO: Is there a big regret that you have?

ALL: My career as a Unitarian Universalist minister, I can’t say that I regret it because it landed me where I am now, but it definitely feels like it was an unnecessarily long detour.

MO: If a student came up to you after a talk that you gave, let’s say a college student and asked you for one general piece of advice on how to live, what would you tell her?

ALL: Live in the real world, which for most of us means getting off of phones and computers and technology as much as you possibly can, and being really aggressive about that.

MO: All right, two more. Can you name a song that invokes for you an intense feeling of nostalgia?

ALL: Wow, I can’t remember who sings this, but “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

MO: Elton John.

ALL: Elton John, yes. Yeah, I love that. It’s like a song I feel like I’ve been singing my whole life, but haven’t yet fully sung it. Right. I’m looking forward to being able to actually sing that song and actually leaving behind all of the trappings and expectations of the yellow brick road.

MO: Okay. Finally, this is a three parter. We ask all of our guests to recommend something to watch a movie or TV show, something to read, and something to listen to. Could be a song, could be a podcast, whatever. So something to watch, read, listen.

ALL: Oh, man. I think I’m going to have to get back to you on that.

MO: You know what? You’re going to send us a voice memo with your answer on that. Okay. And we’re just going to plug it right in. That sound good?

ALL: Okay.

MO: Text me a voice memo. That’ll be at your leisure sometime in the next 24 hours.

ALL: Something to watch, something to read, and something to listen to…

MO: I’ll remind you. Don’t even worry about it.

ALL: Okay.

MO: You don’t have to carry that with you. Ana Levy-Lyons, thank you so much for being on Arc.

ALL: Thank you. This has been such a joy.

So something to watch, I’m going to go with The Matrix. I know its really cliche and dated but I love that movie because it takes this ancient spiritual and philosophical idea about what we think of as the real world actually being a projection of our minds, or, in this case, someone else’s mind. And it takes that idea and depicts it so plainly and literally, and in the packaging of an action-adventure movie. I’m thinking about this a lot these days, that the spiritual path is about learning to see the water that you’re swimming in, the social construct of modern society that we think of is just life.

Something to listen to, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s podcast Interesting Times. Douthat is able to talk with guests to make profound cultural critiques in a way that I just love. As a religious conservative, he can bring a religious way of seeing to modern life, especially technology and media, and I just love it because usually it’s the other way around, the modern world is usually arrogantly critiquing religion.

And something to read. I’m just rereading Rabbi Natan Margalit’s book, The Pearl and the Flame: A Journey Into Jewish Wisdom and Ecological Thinking. It’s an incredibly creative and deep look at how some of the basic building blocks of Jewish tradition—and he looks at minyan, mikdash, and mitzvah—how these elements express fundamental ecological and spiritual realities. It’s fascinating.

MO: Sometimes you get a letter to the editor which is almost as good as the article that the letter is about. Let me tell you what I mean. Back on May 1, over at arcmag.org, we ran an essay by Lee Konstantinou called “Mythic Capital,” how Tolkien is whispering in the ears of America’s most powerful men. And the essay is about how many Silicon Valley plutocrats and oligarchs and venture capital crazy people are obsessed with J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Middle Earth, and so forth. And the essay was great, and we were so pleased to run it, and then we got even more excited that we’d run it when we got a letter to the editor from my buddy Sam Arbesman. He’s the scientist in residence at Lux Capital. He has an extraordinary website and blog. He makes these crazy wacky lists. He’s the author of a forthcoming book called The Magic of Code, which kind of tells you all you need to know about him.

He’s interested in computer code, but he’s also interested in magic. And Sam wrote to us, and I want to quote from the letter to the editor that we ran “To the editor: Related to Lee Konstantinou’s essay on the influence of Tolkien’s work on the tech world, I’ve been maintaining a list for a couple of years called “Tech of the Rings.” It’s an ever-growing collection of tech companies with names inspired by The Lord of the Rings, and the Tolkien legendarium, from Palantir to Valinor.” And Sam goes on to say in this letter that some of these names are associated with the good guys, but some people weirdly have named their tech companies after villains from The Lord of the Rings. And it’s just bizarre. And as somebody who’s never even read Tolkien, I just thought I need Sam to explain this to me. So we got Sam on the horn, and I asked Sam Arbesman to explain to me a little more about Tolkien, the tech world, and the naming of tech companies. Here’s my conversation with Sam Arbesman.

Sam Arbesman: Hey, I am Sam Arbesman. I am Lux Capital scientist in residence and the author of a few books, including The Magic of Code, which is coming out shortly.

MO: And you are a friend of me and a friend of the pod, and you read Lee Konstantinou’s article about Tolkien fandom or The Lord of the Rings fandom on the political far right, alt-right, Trump-right, MAGA right. And you sent me, I would say, the best email that I got about that article, and there were more than a few, but you rise to the top. Tell me what you wrote to me.

SA: That’s very kind. Yeah, so what I wrote was, it turns out for the past couple years, two, three years or so, I’ve been compiling a list of companies mainly in the tech and kind of tech adjacent world that have been named after things from The Lord of the Rings and the broader Tolkien world, because it turns out there is a nontrivial number of them, some of them from the world that Lee kind of discusses in his article, but also more broadly and so this little list kind of called “Tech of the Rings” has quite a number of entries in it.

MO: How many entries are there as of today?

SA: Oh, that is a good question. I don’t actually know. I can actually count here. I have it open. 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. We’re about, I think at 18 or so.

MO: An auspicious number. So okay, take me through, if not all 18, a greatest hits of maybe five or even 10 of them, and assume you’re speaking to a Tolkien illiterate because you are. I have never read any of the Tolkien books. When I was a child of maybe eight or nine or 10 years old, I went to a Saturday morning academic enrichment program. It was a lot of fun. It was pretty chill. I took a chess class, I took a war games class, I took a creative writing class, and during your downtime you could play board games, and there was a board game based on The Hobbit. And so everything I know about Tolkien comes from a few collective hours, few cumulative hours of playing The Hobbit board game that came out in the early or mid-eighties. But I’ve never read any of the books. I’ve seen maybe one or two of the movies, all knowledge I have of Middle Earth and Tolkien is completely ambient and through osmosis. So as soon you’re talking to the idiot that I am, and take me through five or 10 of these companies, what they’re named, whom they’re named for, who the reference is, and then tell me what the company does.

SA: Sure. And to be clear, I am also not a huge Lord of the Rings, kind of Tolkien fan. My interests lie much more to the science fiction world rather than the fantasy world. That being said, I have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. My kids are really into fantasy, so I’ve kind of absorbed some of that kind of stuff. So I’m aware of these things.

MO: You couldn’t possibly be scientist in residence at Lux Capital if you hadn’t at least read The Lord of the Rings. Let’s be honest.

SA: Perhaps that is the requirement. Yes. And by the way, some of these companies actually, Lux is invested in as well. So it’s kind of interesting. So to be honest though, I don’t necessarily know all of the internals of the stories behind the naming, but do the best you can. But yeah, so in one company that is very well known that Lee actually mentions in an article is the company Palantir. And so this one is kind of this massive company that is related to I think information and national security kind of data collection analysis. But in The Lord of the Ring stories, there are these crystal balls essentially called, I think the singular is Palantir, the plurals Palantiri, I believe. And they’re these stones that are used to communicate across long distances, so you can kind of think of them as very simple sort of cell phones or some other sort of FaceTime, kind of communication devices. They also, I think, allow you to see lots of different things that are happening in the world, and then they can also be used to coerce people for evil, so there’s kind of an interesting valence there as well. But yeah, that is kind of the Palantir.

Another one, actually this is a Lux company, is called Anduril. So Anduril is a defense tech company, and they are named after a sword in the sword of The Lord of the Rings. I believe it is the sword of Aragorn, who is kind of this, I guess, the character who eventually becomes a king. I guess spoiler alert, but it’s been around for quite some time. And he’s an heir to some sort of human kingdom.

Actually it’s interesting, one of the things that sparked me making this list. In addition, one of my former colleagues, he and I had just noticed that a lot of the companies and tech firms were being named after The Lord of the Rings, and so we started informally compiling this. At a certain point I of created this list, but Anduril was one of the ones that sparked me to actually, I think, more formally create this list. Because I was reading the entire, this is a number of years ago, reading the entire The Lord of the Rings out loud to my daughter. And I came across Anduril and I had known it was a tech company and I had forgotten its origins. And then when I saw that in the book, I was like, “Oh, there is this very clear connection here.” So Anduril was another one.

But then you have, so Mithril is an investment firm and Mithril, in the world of Tolkien, is this kind of, I think, very strong metal that can be used for armor. And I think it’s sort of one of those Elvish types of armor, or material, that is kind of very special and not really part of the normal human world.

MO: Mithril makes me want to create a parlor game or a drinking game that’s called Tech company based on Tolkien nomenclature, or pharmaceutical drug advertised during CBS crime dramas? Mithril is either a–

SA: Right? It could be, and you can’t tell. And especially with a lot of the pharmaceutical names, because I feel like they’re running out of trademark things, the names are getting weirder and weirder. Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of interesting overlap.

MO: Mithril is either an arthritis drug or it’s a sword slash tech company or something anyway.

SA: Right, exactly.

MO: Alright, give me one or two more.

SA: So there’s Shadowfax, which I believe is a company in India that is responsible for dealing with logistics, I think, but they are named after a very fast horse. It is the horse of Gandalf the Wizard which makes sense for a logistic company. And by the way, by and large, most of the company names are kind of named after God-like entities or kind of things from the good guys, but there are ones that are not that at all.

So one of the examples of not that at all is there’s actually a company called Sauron. So Sauron is the big bad guy in the Lord of the Rings. And there is a company that I believe makes some sort of home security system. I think maybe by analogy with the all seeing Eye of Sauran, the big bad guy has this unblinking eye. That being said, I feel like there’s a lot of weird PR that they’re kind of just asking for by naming their company Sauron.

MO: They thought it was so cool that it overrode the downside of just inviting bad headlines.

SA: We’re going to name this. Yeah, we don’t really care.

MO: I’m actually investing in a whole suite of tech companies right now that are named after Philip Roth characters. One is called Neil Klugman, another is called Zuckerman. That’s what I’m doing. Those will do well. Right? Who wouldn’t invest in those?
You are a man of many lists. Your website has a lot of lists. Do you want to just tell people how they can find your website and what are some of the other lists they can find if they go there?

SA: So my main website is arbesman.net. If you go there, subscribe to my newsletter and see all the weird writings and things I do. And then, yeah, I like making lots of lists. I actually have a list of lists. It was fun to kind of compile all of them. But the other lists are, I have a one called the “Over Edge Catalog,” which are kind of weird non-traditional research organizations that I’ve been compiling for several years. And it’s great that we have universities and corporate industry labs and tech companies, but there are also weird non-traditional organizations that should exist and in fact do exist. And so I’ve begun compiling that.

I’ve compiled a list of new educational models, non-traditional educational institutions, which I think are fun. We kind of need more of. I have what I call the modern wisdom literature canon, I feel like. And there’s the traditional wisdom literature like the Book of Ecclesiastes, things like that. But it turns out there are more modern wisdom literature, and so it turns out, and it’s kind of things that dianetics or something, no, not like that. I would put it as texts that have the flavor of Ecclesiastes around how to make meaning in one’s life, but are maybe either more based on modern science or more social science kind of information. Or are people trying to break out of the traditional self-help and give something a little bit more perennial in terms of wisdom. So for example, the book by Oliver Berkman about time management for mortals. I feel like that it rises a little bit above self-help to something maybe approaching modern wisdom literature. And so I have a list of those kinds of things as well.

MO: Right on. Everyone should go to arbesman.net. I’d like to put up as a candidate for your list of non-traditional organizations. I don’t know if this fits. In the biography that I’m writing of Judy Bloom, for reasons I won’t get into, there’s a footnote that makes mention of a society, a sort of affinity group, of bicycle riders that was called the League of American Wheelmen, and it is now called something like the National Association of Bicycle Riders, but it’s basically a safety advocacy group for people who ride bicycles. But when it was founded the 19th century, it was the League of American Wheelmen. And they now in their branding are such and such formerly known as the League of American Wheelmen. But I thought that makes bicycle riders sound like superheroes. I totally want to be in the League of American Wheelmen. Right?

SA: Oh, that is a fantastic title. Yeah. I yearn to be in that organization.

MO: We all just go join the League of American Wheelmen right now. Well, I hope you’ll come back some other time, send us more emails, give us a running commentary on everything we are doing right and wrong and keep up the good work at arbesmen.net and also with the new book, The Magic of Code, which comes out when?

SA: It comes out June 10th.

MO: Right on. Alright, thanks Sam.

SA: Thank you.

MO: Samuel Arbesman is the author of the forthcoming book, The Magic of Code, and he’s scientist in residence at Lux Capital.

In the next two weeks, we have a bunch of religious holidays. June 5th is the day of Rafa. This is the second day of the Hajj pilgrimage, and it’s considered one of the holiest days in the Islamic calendar. If you’re Muslim and you’re not on pilgrimage, then you would often fast on this day as a way of honoring those who are in Mecca on pilgrimage. June 6th to June 7th is the festival of sacrifice, or Eid al-Adha. It honors the prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son, so this is from the Old Testament. The Jews and Christians also have this story, the Jews called the Akedah, it’s Abraham sacrificing Isaac. And Muslims celebrate it as a festival, which includes special prayer, and, for some, the ritual sacrifice of animals with meat then given out to poor people and to the needy. That’s Eid al-Adha.

June 8th is Pentecost. Roman Catholics know that, some Protestants celebrate it as well. It commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit into the Christian community by coming down to the apostles. And some will say it’s kind of the first day of Christianity as a church community that somehow it’s the birthday of the Christian Church. That’s June 8th, it’s Pentecost.

And Sikhs may know that June 16th they celebrate the martyrdom of Guru Arjan Dev Ji. He was the fifth Sikh guru and the first Sikh to be martyred. He’s remembered for compiling the Adi Granth, which is the holy scripture of Seism and for constructing the Golden Temple in Amritsar. So June 16th, the martyrdom of Guru Arjan Dev Ji.

So birthdays coming up. I just feel like with the decline of morning zoo FM radio, it falls to us to talk about celebrity birthdays. June 3rd is Rafael Nadal’s birthday, he turns 39, and the British songstress, pop singer, beloved of me and my daughter Elizabeth, Beabadoobee turns 24. I’m going to skip past the June 5th birthday because it’s so important and go ahead to June 8th when Kanye West of infamy turns 47. June 9th two of my favorite celebrities, and I didn’t know till just now that they share a birthday, but this will become in some ways a secular holiday for me, June 9th Natalie Portman turns 43 and Michael J. Fox turns 63.

I skipped over June 5th. That is the birthday of Mark Wahlberg, who you may know if you are from the eighties, or a fan of hip hop, or a fan of Entourage, a show he helped produce, or if you just know greatness, you know that Marky Mark Wahlberg turns 53. Mark Wahlberg was of course, the brother of one of the guys in New Kids on the block. He then got a career of his own as the hip hop star, Marky Mark of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. The amount of times in my life that people have tried to nickname me Marky Mark, or say things like, “Hey Marky Mark, where’s your funky bunch?” I could not count on two hands. I would need at least seven or eight hands for that. We’re wishing Marky Mark Wahlberg some good vibrations.

Arc: The Podcast, known to some as Arc with Mark, is hosted by me, Mark Oppenheimer. I would love your feedback. Please write to me at mark.o@wustl.edu. The show is produced and edited by David Sugarman. Audio Consulting by Robert Scaramuccia, intern help by Caroline Coffey and Aaryan Kumar. We love the Danforth Center, which is our spiritual, professional, intellectual, and religious home. The people there who help make this happen include Debra Kennard, Mark Valeri, Abram Van Engen, and Sheri Peña. Our music is by Love Cannon. Web designed by Cause + Effect online at causexeffect.com. Until next time, I remain yours, Mark Oppenheimer.