Mark Oppenheimer: Now that you’re an observant Jew, how crazy do your parents and siblings think you are?

Kelsey Osgood: I guess I get this question a lot.

MO: It’s nice to know I’m not remotely original.

KO: No, no. I mean, you framed it so well because a lot of the time it’s like, what does your family think?

MO: Right. No. I’m just right in.

Hello friends and welcome from the snowbound hovel that is my basement. I’m Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Arc: The Podcast. It’s the audio companion to the web magazine, Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera online at arcmag.org, we are productions of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. So glad to be with you after an absence of a couple weeks.

I have a terrific guest this week, Kelsey Osgood, author of a new book about woman converts to different religions, female converts. It’s simply spectacular, but first I just want to wish you a happy winter. Outside my door right now, there are snow banks that are easily four or five feet tall. Not that that much snow fell, but by the time we had shoveled out the cars and people had shoveled the sidewalks, there are definitely areas of snow that are as tall as my daughter who has just hit five feet. So it’s a true winter wonderland.

I don’t think that I have many prejudices, but I am a true New England chauvinist and winter chauvinist. You have me here on the record saying I will never ever move to a place where it doesn’t snow most years, and in fact, I come from a long line of humans who don’t move to Florida or Arizona, don’t become snowbirds. My grandfather, after the death of my grandmother, he dated a woman. He had a lady friend, as they said in the parlance of the time, Vera, who in their later later years, so I’m talking into their late eighties and early nineties, wanted to go to Florida in the winter sometimes, and eventually he caved and they would put their car on this auto train from Philadelphia down to, I don’t know, Tampa, Pensacola, whatever, and he would spend a month there with her and, I guess, have early bird specials and go to dinner theater and whatnot. But it is to his great credit that he never much liked it. I guess he liked her and so wanted to accommodate, but he was never a Florida dude. He never owned a property there. Let’s put it that way. I am descended from no human who ever owned property in a Sunbelt Sunbird retirement type place, and I plan to keep it up.

So I’m podcasting to you from the heart of the recent snowstorm, and apparently we’re getting more this weekend, so by the time you hear this pod, I might be under even more snow. So what’s the point of all that? The point is that Kelsey Osgood is the author of two books. One is called “How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia” and her more recent book is “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion.” I happen to find conversion among the most interesting of topics, in part because it’s sort of an extreme version, or an explicit version, of what I think we’re all doing, which is always changing.

I think most people go through some evolution or shift in their spiritual or religious beliefs and convert from one point of view to a different one. And so while for most of us that happens within a tradition that we already have, we’re one kind of Jew and we become another kind, or we’re one kind of Methodist and we become another kind of Protestant, let’s say. For some, it’s a more explicit break. They’re nothing, and then they find a religion or they have one religion and then they find another one. And I just think that that phenomenon is something that there’s a little bit of it inside of all of us. I also think that people who are public converts who really leave one thing and go to a whole different community are courageous. It takes a certain amount of courage to burn your life down in that way and rebuild it out of the ashes.

“Godstruck” by Kelsey Osgood looks at seven women and they have their own interesting reasons for converting and their own struggles in their new faiths, and I just think it’s a terrific book. So please enjoy the first part of my conversation with Kelsey Osgood, author of “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion.”

Kelsey Osgood, thank you for joining me.

KO: Thank you so much for having me.

MO: Having just read your book, having just read, “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion.” First of all, I want to make a confession, which is podcast hosts don’t always read every word of every book. Shocking. I know. And I felt like I’d read enough of your stuff and I’d seen you interviewed elsewhere, and I was like, yeah, I’ll give this a meaningful skim. I’ll read her chapter on herself and then I’ll skim the others. And then what happened was I got so thoroughly pulled in, I read every last word in the past three days. I have absolutely devoured this book. It is so good.

KO: Oh, thank you. That’s a good confession.

MO: And I realized, and again, this is going to reveal, I’m just going to say it, even though it makes me look bad and reveals all sorts of prejudices, I realized that I was reading the work of someone who is not what I’m going to refer to as a religion journalist. I’m reading the work of someone who’s a writer and I’m revealing something about myself, which is I often feel pigeonholed as, oh, he’s like the guy who writes stuff on religion, but you would never put him in a category with this New Yorker writer or this Atlantic writer. They’re real prose masters. And that’s my own insecurity that I walk around bearing and I realized I was just reading a book by somebody you could write about anything. You could write about curling, and it would probably be a gorgeous, thoughtful, deep, smart book.

KO: I’m making this face. I’m not sure I agree, but I appreciate the compliment. That’s sweet.

MO: And it’ll be boring for our listeners to hear me keep going on like this, but I felt I had to say that I felt that to be an authentic interlocutor review. I wanted to say. I think it’s a really good book, and I want to start before we get to the question of conversion and your conversion to Judaism, but also other people’s conversions because you talk about seven women, of which you’re only one. I didn’t read your book about your anorexia, and I want to ask you talk about it a little bit how in some ways Judaism replaced anorexia, or saved you from it, or was an answer to it. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but this book is not remotely about that. And so as somebody who is a neophyte in your oeuvre, in your canon, what do the two books have to do with each other, if anything?

KO: Yeah, so I mean I think that they’re in conversation with each other in a way, but I might be biased in that regard. My life, and I remember there was this discussion a few years ago on the internet, are you a narrative person or a non-narrative? Are you a person who sort of crafts a story about who you are or about your life or are you someone who doesn’t do that? I think I’m a very narrative person, so I’m sort of always looking back over at my life and seeing the way things connect to one another. My first book was about anorexia, but it wasn’t only about my experience with anorexia, it was also about what I like to call the culture around anorexia. So particularly when I was an adolescent in the late nineties and then the early two thousands, there was a really strong push to raise awareness about eating disorders and to talk about them and publicize them in the media in a way that was, I think well intentioned to try.

It’s similar to the war on drugs, kind of not war on drugs, but D.A.R.E. and things like this, to tell young people why they shouldn’t be experimenting with these things. So my experience as a young person and my thesis around it was actually that these things kind of worked on this demographic, the demographic most at risk in the opposite way that it just sort of gave … there’s a medical historian, Edward Shorter, who calls it the symptom pool, like keeps something relevant in this way that’s like, here’s a way to express one’s suffering in a way that will be legible, not tangible, legible to people that you might need help from. If you’re a young person, how do you show people that you’re struggling?

And so I talk about the double-edged sword of awareness, and the way in which I think this relates in my own life is that I really look back on it, and I think I would’ve probably articulated it in this way as a young person too. I really look back on my eating disorder as an expression of existential despair. I’m not saying that everybody who experienced anorexia would frame it that way, but I really felt that it came on the heels of me having a sort of rapid deconversion experience as a young person really feeling like, well, I’m going to be smart, and smart people don’t believe in God because it’s obviously a farce. But then really feeling like, well, if the universe is meaningless and life is meaningless, then how do you live? Why live? What’s the point of any of it? And the anorexia sort of became the channel through which I could put all of this energy, this despairing energy in a way that felt practical in a lot of ways.

And then my religiosity, I didn’t convert to Judaism. I was many years recovered by the time I converted. So I asked myself a lot of questions about this at the time. Is this just a strict replacement? Is the search for meaning the problem? Maybe I should give it up entirely or was the search for meaning a valid thing? And it was just that I was young and misdirected when I was thirteen and fourteen, but I think that really starting to explore religion even in the years before I came to Judaism itself, really was me sort of reengaging with this idea that maybe there is a true sense of morality and maybe there is some sort of entity that is out there and that is an entity that has some amount of love for humanity and that wants good things for us and isn’t just randomly throwing us into this pit of nothingness. So that’s sort of how I see them relating to each other.

MO: Yeah, interesting. I just finished reading Ilana Kurshan’s book about reading to her children and have you read that book?

KO: I haven’t, but I read “If All the Seas Were Ink” and I’ve read things of hers.

MO: I haven’t read “If All the Seas Were Ink,” but I’ve read the new one. And she similarly, obliquely at times, but also meaningfully, I think, at a couple points, mentions her anorexia, which was very bad at Harvard. She was parceling out, allowing herself a cheerio if she finished studying a certain amount. And I do … It was impossible for me not to put that book in conversation with this one, only in that you have these two sort of hyperliterate, let’s say modern Orthodox women who at some point when they were less religious, let’s say, although it’s not clear where Ilana was religiously at that point, but she didn’t grow up Orthodox, decided to restrict food out of their lives.

I mean, is there a type? Let me be blunt. Is there a type because the type’s not male. There are definitely male anorexics, I actually know one who almost died of anorexia, but that’s not the type. The type is female, and the ones I’ve known are not women struggling to be models. It’s not, I mean, if I think of the five or ten most eating disordered women I’ve known, and of course I tend to travel in circles where I meet people, I met people through elite high school and elite college, so this is not shocking and maybe there’s a selection bias, but I think the women I knew were not doing this because, so it seemed, they wanted to be the first pick at the fraternity party or on the modeling shooter because they wanted to be actors someday. There was something else going on psychologically in terms of how much space they were taking up in the universe. Control, meaning, attempted mastery. Is there a type?

KO: Yeah, so I think when anorexia was first starting to be better known, let’s put it that way, if you’re talking about the post Karen Carpenter death in the eighties, and then there was this very famous book that came out by a man named Steven Levenkron called “The Best Little Girl in the World,” which really put forward this platonic ideal of who the anorexic was. Maybe she was a ballet dancer. She was very controlled, a perfectionist, a people pleaser. I’m not sure that that type still hold. Maybe it never did, but I’m not sure that type still holds. I think as anorexia has become, to put it bluntly as it’s become more, as the awareness of it has grown, probably more people have gotten it who have developed it, who might never have, if it were two hundred years ago or at a time when it never would’ve occurred to them to express their despair in this way.

I never thought of myself as a classic anorexic type. In fact, I think I just wanted to be that I wanted to be the perfectionist straight A student, and really I was trying to find a way to back my car into the driveway, and I think I thought of anorexia, it was correlated so strongly with this host of really positive personality traits. I’m kind of a lazy student and I’m like, I don’t like confrontation. So I guess I’m a people pleaser in that way, but in these other ways I’m not really. So I thought it sounded great to be like a preternaturally…

MO: High achieving, overachieving, right?

KO: Yes. I was like, I don’t think I’m any of these things. But I do think that one thing that maybe has always been around, and it’s certainly a part of my personality now, is this desire for clarity. And one of the things that I, again, that I really don’t know if I would say I really struggled with it, but I thought about it a lot in the time leading up to the conversion is, well, Judaism is a religion where I think maybe from the outside it seems more this way than it actually is on the inside, but there are all these rules. I really like rules. Maybe that’s actually not a good thing for me to be going towards something that involves a lot of rules. Maybe that’s giving into a part of my personality that I should be trying to dismantle as opposed to placate. But I mean now that I’ve been Jewish for many years, I know that actually the clarity isn’t really quite as much there as you want it to be sometimes.

MO: Right. I did have one friend who said that she was a failed anorexic, that she always wanted to be a skinny perfectionist, and in fact, she was a somewhat plus-sized, non-perfectionist who got B-pluses.

KO: When I was in treatment facilities and things as I went from an adolescent to a young adult, and then I would be in these therapy environments and people would be treating me like that, staring, oh, she goes to Columbia. She’s a white upper middle class woman. And I was like, I think I’m much messier than it looks on paper.

MO: Right. So interesting you think that, I mean, one of the things you do talk about is that Judaism telling you that you are loved, that you’re in the image of God is helpful in that there’s a reason you should be here and not disappear and not starve yourself. I’m sure your parents were wonderful people, so I’m not really asking could they have loved you out of this, but think about, I think as a dad myself, I do wonder is a kind of attachment and love to some extent a prophylaxis against very self-destructive behavior in children? Or is it just that the bug bites some people and they’re going to end up going down a self-destructive path for a while?

KO: So I’m a parent as well, and I wonder this, and the short answer is I don’t really know. I knew a lot of young religious Jewish kids. That’s the first place that I really encountered religious Jewish kids was in treatment facilities. So I know that having a sense of even in a very powerful abstract entity that loves you and a sense of fundamental worth doesn’t necessarily protect you, but I mean it’s probably better than not having that. I mean, in my experience anyway. And I don’t think, just to answer the question that you didn’t quite ask, of course, my parents are lovely people and it wasn’t that they ever indicated to me that I was unloved by them or by the universe at all. I think that I don’t really have a way of explaining it except for people are made differently. I have two siblings who aren’t really, would not, I don’t think describe themselves as seekers or didn’t have this sort of big intense questions that I had as a little kid. I think it’s just sort of a random thing and maybe that I had a greater appetite for understanding these things as a young person, and so I felt more at sea than they did. But that’s just how could any parent anticipate these sorts of things. I don’t know.

MO: I also found it interesting that, I mean, you also write pretty extensively about Leah Libresco, whose book I also just read ad who is a convert to Catholicism, having grown up kind of secular Jewish, nothing, one Catholic parent, one Jewish, but sort of secular, nothing. It’s interesting to me that there are those people who move from atheism to religiosity. I sort of did the same thing myself in that as a seven-year-old. I said, well, God is obviously not real. You can’t see him. I was a rationalist, but I’m not really a seeker. I just ultimately decided religion was a better, was a more interesting, fun way to live.

It was so interesting when I interviewed Leah recently, and that podcast will probably air before this one because I’m very much of the view, if it works for you, it’s fine. Whether it’s true or not, that’s almost beside the point. And what’s more, we’ll never know. I mean, I have radical humility. I think Judaism’s true, but if it’s not, doesn’t diminish my quest. And that drove her bonkers because she’s a quant. I mean if Catholics is not true, she wants to know so she can repent and go back to being an atheist or find Islam or Mormonism or whatever. The point is the search for truth. And so she just flipped the kind of hyper-rationalist conviction that atheism was true. It moved into Catholicism was true.

KO: I do know this about her. I think I’m kind of with you. I do think it’s admirable and I am drawn to those kinds of personalities. And in the book I write about her in the context of writing about one of my subjects who’s a good friend of mine who has a similar, but I would say maybe a little less intense is the word I want to use, but it sounds kind of cliche, like moral probing impulse. And I appreciate those kinds of people. I think they’re very thoughtful and they don’t back down. But I feel like I wonder if it’s something about the theology of Judaism too, which I feel like is much more flexible than Catholicism, but I feel like if I die and they’re like, well, here we are in Salt Lake, and sorry to tell you, you weren’t correct, I would be still happy that I lived this way. I think it’s a beautiful way to live, and I wouldn’t feel that I had wasted my time.

MO: I think that’s really well put. If you end up in the tabernacle at Salt Lake…

KO: I know that’s not their afterlife, but I’m basing it. I joke about this, so just for the visual…

MO: I think that’s a great way to put it. You’d still have felt good about how you spend your time on Earth. Your finite, your four thousand weeks as Oliver Burkeman puts it. Maybe we’ll circle back to your own conversion, but the book is sixth-sevenths about other people. What made you want to write about converts? I too am fascinated by converts and the book was in some ways made for me, but what made you interested in this as a topic for your second book?

KO: So it’s a combination of I would say a benign narcissism, which is that I was converting and so I was interested in it because it was something I was going through. But also I think I tend to be interested, as a writer, for better and worse, in things that are the opposite of trends. What I was interested in at the time, when I converted was 2015, but so I was doing a lot of study and lifestyle change in the few years that led up to this. So I really started thinking about it in 2012, 2013. And at that time it was really, or at least in my milieu, I lived in Brooklyn, I went to Columbia. Most of a vast majority of my friends were secular. It was not like a normal or hip thing. And I thought that it was interesting to think about becoming religious or being religious, which at one point in time would’ve been thought of as the height of conformity or even being retrograde now because of the time we were in would all of a sudden from a certain vantage point and in certain contexts would be kind of countercultural.

So that was one primary reason why I wanted to look at it. And so I thought about that issue quite a bit and I wondered if other converts also felt that way, if they felt that there was some way in which they were moving against the force of history if they saw themselves as doing that and how they viewed their decisions in light of the time in history we were in. So it’s actually as an aside, it’s kind of an interesting moment for the book to come out because now everyone was like, oh, converting is so trendy now. And I was like, I had really thought of it as being an examination of a backward trend or however you want to say.

Yeah. So that’s why I was interested in it in the first place. I thought about this more now I think, than I did at the time when I was really conceiving of the book idea. But I think it’s an interesting, I think it makes us uncomfortable as an idea, the idea of religious conversion on the one hand, because I think for a lot of people it feels like it has all sorts of bad cultural connotations. But also even if you look back at William James, even though he writes really admiringly of a lot of the converts that he talks about Tolstoy and George Fox and these people, there is also this undercurrent of like, but they’re all a little nuts. So it’s something about, I think the fact that it can be really fast that makes people uncomfortable and the fact that it can seem, or people describe it sometimes as out of their control, things that are happening, it happens to them as opposed to change that we enact from within.

MO: And that was one of the things I wanted to ask about. The Muslim convert, Hana, is her name, and the Latter day Saint convert. I think all of us in the religion journalism world are working hard to honor the Mormons’ request that we no longer call the Mormons.

KO: It’s so hard though.

MO: Part of the problem is if we say to anyone else Latter-day Saints, they don’t know who, our audiences don’t know who we’re talking about. So it’s like…

KO: My big problem is the ism part. There’s no way to say the noun of the, you can’t say Latter-day Saintism

MO: Right.

KO: So I have to say Mormonism, you’ve given me no grammatical choice here.

MO: I know I had a weird moment when I realized that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is now just supposed to be called the Tabernacle Choir, and I thought, I mean literally talk about bad branding.

KO: I know.

MO: They’re taking one of the great brands in music and saying, nope, we’re not going to call it that anymore.

But let’s talk about the Latter-day Saint Woman and the Muslim woman. The Muslim woman found that Islam spoke to her. The Mormon woman, she’s really a girl at that point, really has a warmth in her heart. She actually feels it physically. What do you make of the difference in your conversion, which I think is in some ways similar to what a lot of people who become more observant in Judaism feel, which is that sort of gradually begins to seem like a wiser way to live, or a more rewarding way to live, but there’s no slain in the spirit kind of thing about it.

What do you make when you read these slain in the spirit narratives? To me, I have a number of reactions. One is I don’t want them to be true because of course if they’re true, what happens when I get slain in the spirit and have to leave my Judaism and become a Mormon? But of course if they’re not true, then the person, then I really have to take the view that this person is deluded, crazy, totally misunderstanding. People could look at a kind of someone who ups their Jewish observance and say they’re just moving into a lifestyle that seems to make more sense, whether that’s a fair way to put it or not. But it’s very hard to read her narrative of becoming a Latter-day Saint without thinking she’s either very right or very wrong. And I guess I’m curious, how do you as a journalist and as a human encounter that sort of narrative, like my heart started burning?

KO: Yeah, gosh, it’s a really good question and I think that it’s interesting.

I mean, I think some of it is a Jewish thing, even if, I don’t know if I remember in depth all the texts that I learned. I hired somebody to go through a lot of Talmudic sources about conversion in the lead up to writing the book. And I remember there’s one in particular that’s listing all these reasons why you can’t convert. And one of them is because the idea came to you in a dream. So there’s this sort of suspicion about maybe these mystical ways in which you could…

MO: Do you remember, you must’ve read Lauren Winner’s book, “Girl Meets God,” right? Do you remember?

KO: I never have actually.

MO: You never have. Fellow Columbia alumna. But Jesus comes to her. It’s not the only thing that happens, but among the things that happens is Jesus comes to her in a dream looking like Daniel Day-Lewis, for that’s worth.

KO: Yes.

MO: Carry on.

KO: Okay, that’s kind of fair. I could see that casting in real life.

MO: Sure.

KO: But anyway, and I do think that the Jewish world has this culture now of not just turning on a dime. If you look at the Talmud, there is a very, there’s a much faster version of conversion that they envision the sages versus what we have now, which is really like, you got to stop and think about this. You have to live out the lifestyle. It’s a difficult ritualistic life that even people who’ve lived their whole lives in it sometimes are learning things that they didn’t know before. So I think if I’m being totally honest, reading the narrative and hearing my subjects tell me their stories of what you might call an immediate conversion moment, or a white light moment, or a road to Damascus kind of thing, I have the same reactions that you do.

I don’t think I have the fear reaction a little bit. I have it in terms of not necessarily religiosity, but well, what if change could happen? What if there was a snap of the fingers and something fundamental that I thought about the way that I believed or who I was as a person just changed immediately? That’s scary to think about and destabilizing. But I do think that the challenge I have with it with somebody like Kate who became a Latter-day Saint, and also Sarah, who was my subject, who became an evangelical, who really described her experience as in a prayer like classic, I’m in a prayer service, they’re playing guitar and singing, and I’m just having this vision of Jesus taking away all of my pain and my troubles.

In some ways I’m like, that’s nice and lovely, and I’m not like, I am not going to discount your, if you say that you had real pain in your life and then it got taken away immediately, I don’t really care how that happened. I’m glad for you. But on the other hand, for all of them, I think, or at least for Kate and Sarah, there was this idea that there was the immediate conversion moment, but then there were kind of caveats. They didn’t necessarily always present it that way. But Sarah, for example, had said, I got, just to give people some background, she had some symptoms of trauma that she was dealing with from having been close to the Boston bombing at the marathon. And she really described it to me as, once I had this conversion experience, all those traumas were gone and then would later say, except for this and this other thing. So it wasn’t that it was all gone, it was just some portion of it was gone and she still had to work on it through these other secular means.

And for Kate, she had this moment where she was praying, but she told me I did not want to get baptized right away. I wanted to do my due diligence. It was very important to me. So it was this kind of push and pull between something that’s happening from an external source and that changes my entire life, but also either it doesn’t change certain things or I’m going to retain control over certain aspects of it. I think that those stories were contradictory. They contradicted themselves sometimes, but I guess there’s a part of me that’s sort of like, I don’t know who among us doesn’t contradict ourselves sometimes.

MO: We do seem to be in this moment where a lot of people, and this includes your subjects, are saying secular modernity does not suffice.

It’s so interesting to me reading, especially after something like the Charlie Kirk shooting was so horrific, and publications like the Free Press, like Bari Weiss’s publication and others, and the Times, everyone comes out with these essays about what could be done. Let’s assume that the person who committed this crime or people who are drawn to that kind of criminality, they often suffer from this kind of pointlessness, purposelessness enemy, and you really feel all of a sudden you’re just reading Charles Taylor, but dumbed way down, which is we’re in this secular age. People used to feel the world was enchanted, and now they have, and it’s also kind of Alasdair MacIntyre. It’s all these Christian philosophers who’ve been saying to us, you need to live within something and secular modernity and liberalism is not going to be sufficient.

And do you have a sense of where it’s all going? I mean, Ira Stoll, whose stuff I read who’s a conservative Tory Republican, he’s obsessed with the idea that we’re about to have a religious reawakening and he scours the poll data, and the latest data is the decline in church attendance has basically leveled off. It hasn’t turned up. It’s not that more people are go to church, but the cratering seems to have stopped.

And I for one much as I would love to believe that for a host of reasons and pretty unpersuaded, I think that actually what you’re writing about, and I love what you’re writing about, and it’s what I write about sometimes, is a niche phenomenon that there’s not going to be hundreds of thousands of people seriously … I mean, the religions that we’re doing it, like Mormonism and the Southern Baptist Convention have kind of really leveled off. It doesn’t anymore look like it did 20 years ago where they might be taking over the world. There is no religion that’s getting hundreds of thousands of new converts, and a lot of the people you write about are very cerebral and are kind of very specific. But I don’t feel like if I stepped outside my door, even in this sort of college town, and just talked to the firemen across the street, that he would know anybody who’s going through this. Do you see the prospects for lots of people returning to traditional religiosity in a country where that has not been the trend?

KO: I don’t really see it. I think I’m with you. And again, that Pew Center study that I think you’re talking about, the one that said that the church decline in church attendance has plateaued. It came out right before my book came out, and a lot of people who interviewed me were asking questions like, oh, they had made the assumption that meant that people were joining churches, but that’s not necessarily what’s happening. It could be that people who five years ago would’ve been leaving just hadn’t left, or it doesn’t necessarily mean that lots and lots of people are coming in. It just means that people aren’t going out. So that’s a different thing, I think. I don’t really see it. You see it, and again, there are all these data points and all these little phenomenon that I know of, and I met some of them I mentioned in the book, and they happen every so often that seem to point in the direction of a religious revival that don’t really go anywhere. There was one in 2014 to 2016, there were a number of studies that showed that more young Catholic women were contemplating becoming nuns, and this was really exciting. A lot of people in the vocations world were like, oh my gosh, this is great. It’s going to be a vocations revival. And vocations had been an absolute death spiral before then.

But it turns out a lot of the time, what that stuff is measuring is people are interested. It’s easy to say that you’re interested in a study.

MO: Well, it’s funny, I actually wrote a story around that time about the Dominican Abbey nunnery, I forget, forget my terminology. In Tennessee that was getting a lot of these women and they had doubled. They’d gone from 15 to 30 women or something, which of course in the grand scheme of things is literally zero. But as a liberal Catholic religious pointed out, as a liberal nun pointed out to me, she said, yeah, but that’s all they’re getting. And there are lots of conservative convents out there. There are hundreds of conservative convents that are getting zero women, literally every woman in America, or in the Anglophone world, who wants to become a fairly traditional cloistered nun or vow taking nun. All of them are there. That’s the 12 of them. It’s not happening at a hundred other convents. And in fact, it’s happening at four or five other convents, but it’s not it. You’ve met them all. You can literally find the emails of all of them. And yet it was becoming this big deal in conservative Catholic media because yes, this convent had gone from 15 to 30, which was huge for them, and they were going to have a future, but that’s all there was.

KO: Right? And a lot of it, like you look now, we’re 10 years down the road and there hasn’t been, the convents are not swelling overflowing with postulants. And so I think you have to take these things with a grain of salt. And I think if you’re talking about the writer that you mentioned, okay, if there’s an urgency to reenchantment, I find that, I think that that’s very hard, if not impossible to do, to reenchant the world, given where we are with our technological prowess and our knowledge and our understanding of ourselves. I just don’t think we’re going to go back to medieval times where we really feel in a visceral way the way that a person then might have felt, that God is present. Unless you’re like a true mystic and there are some people who are just born mystics, and that’s the way and the way they view it.

I mean, I think the sticking point, and then you have to say, okay, well, is religion better from a lifestyle perspective? I would argue yes, almost certainly it is. But for a lot of individuals and in a lot of faith traditions, I would say Judaism probably the least, but someone could argue with me on this, becoming religious for the lifestyle wouldn’t feel like enough. They would feel like, okay, I recognize that for my social health because of societal loneliness or whatever, I should become a Catholic. But the cognitive dissonance between being a sociological Catholic and going to church and not believing would be too hard. Whereas in my community, I do know people who are very open. I don’t know if there’s a God, but this is the world that I live in and I connect to Judaism in all these other different ways, and I don’t feel…

MO: And I think there’s a middle ground which I don’t think is dishonest, which is, I remember one guy who started coming to synagogue because he said, well, what else am I going to do with my kids on a Saturday morning? They’re not in school. He had a two and a 4-year-old. I’m paraphrasing somewhat, but he had a two and a four-year-old, and his wife deserved some hours of the week off. I think the kids were in daycare during the week or nursery school, and then on the weekends as a good dad, he should be on for some of it. And he realized taking them to children’s services was a great way to do that. And then slowly he began realizing, actually Judaism gives you a lot of things you’re supposed to be doing. You’re supposed to be in shul on Saturday, but you’re also supposed to have a kind of dinner Friday night, and you’re also supposed to, if you take it to, there’s a point at which if you’re male, you’re actually praying with other men twice a day every day, and there’s lots of holidays, not just three. There’s actually a couple dozen.

And he accessed all that beginning with the idea of what else am I going to do with my kids? Oh, wait, telling these stories that we’ve been telling for a couple thousand years and singing these songs is actually a great thing to do with my kids a couple hours a week. And so I don’t know if he ever got to the place of, I believe in God, but he certainly began to believe in Judaism in more than just a sort of sociologically. He never thought, I’m doing it for my health, I’m doing it because I read that Harvard’s longevity study that said, my blood pressure will stay low.

KO: Right. Yeah. I think Judaism in particular, there are a lot of paths in that aren’t, I think that most denominations of Christianity, it’s harder to do that. I think Judaism has a lot of different ways to connect that are all valid and strengthening, and that you can do that without really directly approaching the God question. I think that’s harder if you’re a Mormon, for example. Sorry, a Latter-day Saint.

MO: I’ve actually thought for years I’ve been waiting for there to be a reform Mormonism, a kind of non-literal theology of Mormonism for people who are culturally Mormon. You know, New York City must have thousands of people who are grew up Mormon, move to the city and don’t go to church anymore. And I’ve sort of been waiting for the story that someone more closer to the ground than I will write about how they’re actually having a kind of parachurch community that actually they would feel so much shame about appropriating the rituals. They would feel they don’t deserve the rituals anymore. Whereas reformed Jews reconstructist Jews, even Orthodox, we don’t have that problem. We’re going to do first and then believe, or do then listen. For Mormons, that’s so culturally alien to them, or Muslims, it can be so culturally alien. They feel like if I’m not fundamentalist or literalist, I don’t deserve the rituals.

I am Mark Oppenheimer, and you’ve been listening to me talking with Kelsey Osgood, the author of “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion.” It’s 2026, and the podcast is cooking with gas as Raymond Carver writes in, was it Cathedral? His short story where one character says, “I’m cooking with gas now, bub.” We are cooking with gas, bub.

In the coming weeks. I’ll be talking to R.R. Reno, Rusty Reno, as he’s known to people in the industry. He’s the editor of First Things, a conservative Christian magazine that has become increasingly Trumpy, and I’m eager to talk with him about that and other stuff. I’ll also be talking with former Harper’s magazine editor Christopher Beha, who has a new book out on not being an atheist, on being an ex-atheist. Who else am I talking to? I’m going to be sitting down with the theologian Miroslav Volf and the poet Christian Wiman, who have a new co-authored epistolary book in which they write letters back and forth from a theologian and a poet to each other. And then in a month or two or three, I’ll be talking with Paul Eli, who is at Georgetown’s Berkeley Center, but is also the author of a book that came out last year about art and religion in the eighties. So some Madonna, for example, some Andy Warhol, lots of that stuff. It’s a really good book, and I should have talked to him when the book came out last year, but I’ll be talking to him on the occasion of its paperback edition coming out this May. So lots of cool stuff coming up on the podcast. If you’re enjoying it, please make sure you’re a subscriber and please shamelessly promote us to all of your friends. They will love you for it. And now back to part two of my conversation with Kelsey Osgood.

Now that you’re an observant Jew, how crazy do your parents and siblings think you are?

KO: I guess I get this question a lot, so it’s a good question. I would have to ask them. I mean, my parents are Midwestern by birth, and I grew up in Connecticut in Fairfield County in sort of what’s considered the poster town for WASP culture, I think, or one of them.

MO: Please tell me it’s New Canaan.

KO: It’s Darien.

MO: Oh, Darien. Okay. That was my next guess. Okay. I was close. I was super close.

KO: They’re kind of the same thing except one has the highway that goes through it. They aren’t, let’s just say we haven’t had very many really direct and comprehensive conversations about my and my family’s religious life. I definitely think it was surprising, especially because they thought of me as sort of the outspoken agnostic slash atheist of their children. Not to say that my brothers were ever exhibited any religious behavior or feelings, but maybe I was very forthright about the fact that I thought religion was silly. I thought I was like, baby Richard Dawkins or something. And so that felt like a reversal that was really confusing.

And I know that I have a lot of sympathy because I know it’s very challenging. I mean, even me, having now I’ve been Jewish for 10 years and I still feel like I’m learning things where I’m like, oh, no, I was supposed to be doing that. So they have so little experience from Judaism outside of me and my husband and my children that sometimes they’re like, oh, can we do something on X date? And I’m like, oh, that’s some minor fast day. And they’re like, what is this? Another thing? There’s just a lot.

MO: You’re like, ma, that’s Taanit Esther, I can’t possibly do that. It’s Tzom Gedaliah, what are you talking about mom?

KO: So I think it can be really challenging. I think stuff around food is really challenging. I don’t come from a big hospitality culture. It’s not like I was raised in an Italian American family where it was such a big deal to be gathering over meals or whatever. But even so, it’s very fraught and I’m always like, oh, I don’t want to be impolite about the fact that I don’t want you to make my kid food, but they think it’s just loaded. I don’t know. I think they think in some ways, in some ways I feel, and I feel this myself, and maybe they feel this too, that yes, we are a Jewish family. I have three boys, so my youngest is two, but my older two, they wear kippahs and they wear tzitzit. And in some ways they’re probably like, this is so weird. But in other ways, we live in a suburban house and my kids play soccer, and so I would have to ask them, but I feel like even for me, when I look at my own life, I’m like, is this so incredibly bizarre or is this actually much closer to an approximation of my suburban childhood than I ever thought that I would have? When I was 21, I thought I was going to be like a Bohemian or whatever.

MO: Right.

KO: Now I drive to hockey practice just like my mom did. Yeah.

MO: Your sons do ice hockey?

KO: Yeah, ice hockey. But I kind of hate it.

MO: Which I do feel is the least Jewish sport. I used to have this fight with my co-host on Unorthodox all the time. I just feel like Jews don’t play ice hockey, but you live not far from the great writer Rich Cohen, who’s wrote a book about peewee hockey in Fairfield County. So what do I know?

KO: All the kids play hockey, and I really, my eldest …. this is an aside, he wanted to do it. I’m not convinced he loves it. I hate it. It is so schelppy, but we’re just in this toxic, where we just can’t, I’m like we should just quit. And nobody …

MO: Also, I grew up in Massachusetts where ice hockey is very, it’s like French Canadians and some Irish, and it’s very sort of deep north goyish. I didn’t know Jews who played ice hockey. I mean, I didn’t know from ice hockey and still really don’t, and I’m okay with that.

So is there any hope for liberal Protestantism? I noticed that when you went out set out to write this book, obviously you didn’t find anyone who became deeply United Methodist or Congregationalist. Those are really hard people to find, right? If you find Protestants, they’re, if you find Protestant converts in their early twenties, the odds are overwhelming that they’re going to have converted to some sort of fairly conservative evangelicalism. They might hold onto a progressive politics, but the church they’re in is going to be pretty evangelical in a pretty conservative coded way. I live in a city where all of the old UCC churches, all the old kind of mainline Protestant churches are being turned into condos.

And this is New Haven, which probably had more congregational churches per capita than any other city in the world. And they’re condos now. I mean, I don’t know a soul. I know maybe three people in my community who regularly go to a non-evangelical Protestant church. I know Lutheran, my alderman is a kind of progressive Lutheran. He’s from the Midwest, from that sort of Lutheran culture, grew up singing choirs. I know one woman who I hear goes to United Center Church on the Green, which is an old congregational church, but literally, I could count on one hand the Protestants, the liberal Protestants, what’s going on there? And are they just dead down for the count? You probably get emails all the time from converts who have read your book. Are any of them in the liberal Protestant world?

KO: No, and I think people who end up there, I think it’s often they’re on their way down as opposed to on their way up. They’re coming from some sort of higher bar religious environment, and they don’t want to, for whatever reason, they don’t want to leave being religious altogether, but they’re finding the strictures of their community too much.

I mean, I say this, first of all, I’m not a sociologist, so I don’t have the numbers. I’m just taking a guess here. And I don’t mean this as a comment on liberal theology because I think there’s lots of lovely things abouts liberal theology, but I also think that sometimes I feel like there are a lot of lovely things about it on paper, but it just doesn’t work.

I could be proven wrong. I think that part of the, without going back and talking about Protestant work ethic and Charles Taylor’s idea that we’re putting everything inside the individual, and once you do that, then you’re on the path to individualism. And once you’re on the path to individualism, how do you bring back the community aspect? But I think for religion to work in terms of creating and sustaining communities, which I think is one thing that we talk about a lot these days because the secular world, what I see coming out of the secular world anyway, is a lot of frustration and a lot of sadness about the fact that they don’t know how to do that. They feel that that’s gone and they don’t know how to recreate it. So there has to be these group behavioral components, and I think a lot of these group behavioral components, they don’t happen unless there are pretty strong cultural norms and pretty clear rules and expectations.

And the liberal denominations have sort of infused themselves with enough or infused their ideas with enough of secular American modern ideas about the self and what the self is owed and what the self deserves that it’s kind of hard to turn around from that and be like, but now you have to show up at X time and do X thing. I mean, I remember it’s sort of like that Pew Center study that came out in 2013 that showed that all the liberal denominations of Judaism were atrophying and Orthodoxy was going to be the only thing left in however many years. And people were really upset about that. And I don’t think it’s a good thing that liberal denominations of Judaism die out, but at the same time, what a lot of people said then I think is true, if you lower your expectations–it’s so sad, it’s a sad comment on human nature maybe–when you lower your expectations, people don’t say, oh, well, I’m going to rise above that. They’re going to do whatever they can get away with.

MO: Yeah, no. Well, and that in some ways is why I thought that your chapter on the Quaker woman, again, they would have me call her a Friend, but then nobody knows what you’re talking about. It felt a little bit like cheating because I don’t know how Quaker is any Quaker. I mean, I know other people who say they’re Quakers, by which they mean they’ve gone to a meeting, and I have a good friend who was pretty deep in for a while. But certainly the sort of normative or modal Quaker is not somebody who feels very profoundly obligated. I mean, that often is a kind of, and again, this wasn’t true for my friend who really did, he took his kids and his father-in-law went, and it was definitely part of his life for a while. But for a lot of Quakers, it’s wellness. I like silence on Sundays or it’s very much politics. First I went, I like spirituality, and I heard that they were pacifists, and so I went.

KO: Right, or I think now also I heard they were pacifist and progressive.

MO: Which by the way, as you point out, not all of them are. It’s almost like it’s a myth they benefit from. But I don’t know, look, I forget her name. Angela? Angela. And a few years in, I mean, does she feel profoundly obligated to her fellow members of the Brooklyn Quaker meeting? Does it look like what the Mormons life looks like or the Jews life looks like? Or is it a kind of valuable practice, but without the sense of obligation?

KO: It’s a really good question, and I would say probably the latter. Look, I think if you’re a liberal Quaker, and I think there are differences, if you’re a conservative Quaker, but there are like five of them, or if you’re an evangelical Quaker, but then you’re in a cultural context that’s so vastly different. But if you’re a liberal Quaker, then yeah, I think the obligations are pretty low. She recently got married and she did have a meeting. She did not marry a Quaker, but there’s a kind of clearance needed.

MO: Shockingly, she didn’t find a compatible Quaker spouse in her twenties in New York.

KO: There’s meetings that you have before you get married where I think you just talk about the spiritual ramifications of marriage. And she did do that. But she’s like a self-driven person who is very thoughtful about the kinds of topics that I wrote about her thinking about in the book morality and ethical behavior and things like that. And I think that not everybody who was born a Quaker who shows up at a Quaker meeting is necessarily doing that or is driving themselves to do it. In theory, you could go and even go to the extent that you asked to be made a Quaker by commencement, which is one of their terms, that again, nobody could convert to Quaker and then never go again. And I don’t think there would be really any serious repercussions to that. And to her credit though, or at least to round it out a little, it’s something that she struggles with about Quakerism before she formally joined and now. There are parts of this theology that are really beautiful and appealing to me, but there’s also, I can’t, how do I behave in that, and what does it mean to be a Quaker other than to go to meeting for worship and to maybe think about Quaker values, which in retrospect are probably things that I would be thinking about already.

MO: Well, and it’s not just that her fellow Quakers would be untroubled if she didn’t come back. It’s that if she were evangelical or Mormon or Orthodox Jewish, people would call her and say, you haven’t been here. We miss you. Where are you? They would try to get her back on and I venture to guess that nobody in her Quaker meeting is saying, where’s Angela been? We owe it to her soul to get her back here.

KO: I don’t know for sure, but I think that’s a safe guess.

MO: A fair, you know … Which cuts to the heart in some ways of not just the theology, but the sociology. I mean, whether you’re doing something like Orthodox Judaism or Mormonism because you think it’s true in the Leah Libresco sense or because you think it’s good for you or because you think it’s a profound civilization, all of those paths would require that you reach out to people who are falling away and say, are you sure you don’t want to come back? And that’s just not something, say, Quakers are I think are good at, I say that as alumnus of a Quaker summer camp where I spent one miserable summer.

KO: And liberal Quakerism also has this element to it, which is very much about the individual experience and being a non-creedal faith, and so there’s this way in which they kind of cut their feet out from under them. If the individual has this sort of understanding of God that can’t really be objected to by an outsider and it’s all up to you, then why? At a certain point, why do you need the community? Maybe you don’t need it at all, right?

MO: Though you could imagine that cutting the other way, and you could imagine a kind of fundamentalist Quaker, if we can imagine this person saying, Angela, I noticed you, but I hear you being going to a Southern Baptist church or a PCA church, conservative Presbyterian church, those people are bringing evil into the world by trying to enforce creeds and normativity and rules on people who should be to listen to their inner light. We think you should come back to us. You’re actually … there’d be almost a negative theology of any other community is one where you’re probably propagating a kind of spiritual harm on people and therefore given that there is a God and that you shouldn’t be prop against the spiritual harm, the only people to hang with are us. But I don’t imagine they have that kind of conviction. I’m just hypothesizing here. I mean, frankly I was just impressed you met a twenty. something Quaker.

KO: Well, we were friends before, so I kind of lucked out, and she was like, you can write about me. I was like, oh yeah.

MO: Reading your book again, sort of adjacent to having read Leah Libresco’s book, which is not an overtly Catholic book, but is very clearly a Catholic book. It made me think about something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is we Jews, perhaps in part because we have this tradition sort of cultural tradition, it’s not really halakha, but it’s a culture of non-proselytization, we don’t reach out and tell people here’s why Judaism is good for you. I don’t feel, we’ve been very good about being in the public square lately. When I think about all the books that are sent to me for review and a lot of which I read, and you get them too. You and I are aware that you’ve got everything from your Charles Taylor and your Alasdair MacIntyre moving out of the academy and into the public discourse. And then you’ve got your First Things type, your R.R. Renos and your Julia Yosts and your, and you’ve got your more quirky, maybe progressive, like Leah Libresco is hard to pin down ideologically, but also very Roman Catholic, and you’ve got Ross Douthat, you’ve got all these Christians saying this is good for you. And I sometimes have this feeling, and maybe it’s just a kind of male alpha domination feeling of where are the Jews saying, guys, this is what’s good for you.

Now obviously, I think you’re a reporter, you’re not trying to be the public theologian there, but I’m curious for you as a fellow Jewish reporter, do you sometimes feel like why are the Christians both so interested in this and so good at it and why aren’t there the great book on why since Heschel have we not produced the normative book on why everyone needs the Sabbath, or why people need to grieve in a group of why you need 10 people to do anything meaningful? It feels like we have these riches that stay within our community and then someone like a Sharon Brous writes a good book and it doesn’t sell the way it should, and the Christians are just relentlessly pummeling us with public theology. This isn’t a very articulate question, but I’m just curious, do you know what I’m talking about?

KO: I guess probably a lot of it comes down to the fact that we, and I’m saying we here, even though I can’t really include myself, I wasn’t socialized this way, but Jews are socialized to…

MO: Sister, you’ve done ten years in the trenches, forget … enough imposter syndrome. Just own it.

KO: I wasn’t steeped in this environment as a child.

MO: You know what, I wasn’t either. You know, who wasn’t, reform and secular Jews, you know, who else wasn’t steeped in it? None of us were steeped in it. Come on.

KO: So like I think that …

MO: It’s home watching pro-wrestling Saturday mornings.

KO: I think there’s a deep discomfort with something that looks like proselytizing and whether that comes as, I think that comes from a couple of things. One is the historical idea and the part of our identity that feels very strongly and we don’t proselytize. That’s a point of pride I think, for Jews because we think that proselytizing has led to a lot of terrible things over the course of history because it has.

MO: Well, and it would’ve gotten us killed in Christian lands.

KO: Exactly.

MO: I mean that’s also part of it.

KO: So whether or not, I know there were times in Jewish history when proselytizing did happen, but it’s something that we’ve really super distanced ourselves for. So then what happens is that we … and then there are these ideas, some of them textual and halachic and some of them just cultural that certain things are not really for everybody. We have Shabbat, I’m a big evangelist for Shabbat, but I’m not going out and telling the Catholics, you should keep Shabbat in the Jewish way because there’s something really uncomfortable about that. And maybe there’s some sort of gatekeeping element where I’m like, well, it’s not for you. And maybe it’s just understanding that the mechanics of keeping a Shabbat outside of a Jewish community. So I mean, as somebody who, when I started to become observant, kept Shabbat kind of on my own more or less, I wasn’t in the kind of environment where I am now where everybody around me is keeping Shabbat for the most part. That’s very complicated and it’s hard to bottle that and sell it, I think. And then when you try to make it pluralistic, it just kind of sounds like dumb wellness. Take time from your phone and take a bath or whatever.

MO: There’s a California influencer whose name, I think I remember it. I’m not going to shame her, but maybe you know who it is, who’s like the Shabbat, the power down person and they’ve made it into a wellness almost. There’s probably an app for it. And yes, I agree. I’m with you.

KO: People do this a lot with Shabbat. I wrote a really cranky piece for Wired about it, which was really fun, where I was just like, okay, just do the artist’s way if you really want to, but it’s not Shabbat, it’s just fine. Just take time off. So then I think what happens is because of those things when you’re writing basically in support of Judaism, you tend to write for a Jewish audience. And then that’s why some …

MO: Sorry to interrupt, let me reframe. It feels like Christians have a very big voice right now in public theology, especially as it relates to government and politics. It feels like, it feels like there’s no Jewish answer to what’s going on with Compact Magazine or First Things or just any sort of number of Christian blogs, Christian websites, Gospel Coalition, you name it. It feels like there’s no, I mean, you could have said maybe Tablet was doing some of that, but now they’re all in print and not published on the web. The Forward, that’s not their mission. And neither one of them was aspiring to be that kind of public theology platform. They were much more newspapers, magazines, public interest, whatever. It feels like there’s no Jewish witness in the public sphere about the way that Leah is saying, here’s what Catholics have to say about abortion.

KO: Yeah, I am not sure that I really know if only probably some of it has to do with the contraction of media generally. Maybe it’s, some of it has to do with the fact that so much public dialogue that relates to Judaism right now has to do with the war in Israel and Gaza, and that just kind of swallows everything else up. And so it feels hard to have, okay, let me have this meaningful conversation about, I do remember this happening a little bit here and there around certain, the Dobbs decision and things you would, every once in a while I would see something that was like…

MO: Yes.

KO: Here’s what the Jewish position on abortion is.

MO: You know where I feel it euthanasia, which I’m really against, and I’m just really troubled by it. And it puts me at odds with a lot of my fellow democratic voting, progressive friends. I just think it’s, and it feels very religious to me. It feels very much like it is not doctor’s job to snuff out human life.

KO: Right.

MO: If you don’t see that, you and I are just … we’re across a chasm that most of the time we can ignore and we can’t ignore it on this. And the people who agree with me who are quoted publicly tend to be right-wing Catholics.

KO: Yes. No, I have this with that, with euthanasia particularly as well, as well as some other things that I won’t go into, but that are in and around medicine where I feel like, oh my gosh, why am I agreeing with the Catholics on everything? And you’re right, they’re very, and that I think maybe on that issue, which I know is a very live one, and it’s changing really quickly, and maybe there is a Jewish voice out there that should really get on that.

MO: Maybe some editor like me should find that person.

KO: Maybe.

MO: Maybe this is …

KO: I think this is your job.

MO: This is my job. Your job is to write amazing books. What are you working on next?

KO: Oh my gosh, I wish I had a good answer for that, but I don’t really.

MO: I have five questions. The traditional five lightning round questions. Are you ready?

KO: Oh no, okay.

MO: These are quick.

KO: Okay.

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

KO: Yes, I believe in God. I have a literal belief in God that lines up with the Jewish understanding of God in all of its complexity.

MO: If you could have had any other job within reason, like something you plausibly could have done, if you’d made different choices, I’m assuming you could not have been an Olympic sprinter, I’m assuming you could probably not have been an astronaut though, maybe you could have, but something that if you’d made different choices in your own life you could have done, what would it have been?

KO: I probably would’ve answered this question differently at different points in my life, but right now my answer would be a nurse.

MO: I’ve given that answer. I feel the same way.

KO: It’s my very weird escape fantasy that I think about constantly.

MO: Yeah, it’s, it’s in the top five for me. I mean, it’s not number one or two right now, but I’ve thought about that. Do you have a very big regret?

KO: I have so many regrets.

MO: It’s okay. Pick one.

KO: I don’t know if I have a big one. I have just lots and lots of small ones. I would say in some ways maybe I regret not starting to have kids earlier in life. Maybe that’s a big regret. I regret wasting a lot of time in my day-to-day life. That’s a small work. I feel like everybody regrets that though. Yeah, I don’t know if I have anything really huge. No, I do have one, but I couldn’t have known it at the time. And I’ll make a long story short, when I was in my early and mid twenties, I worked as a writer’s assistant for a very cantankerous, complicated, angry, true crime writer who had Lou Gehrig’s disease. And for a variety of reasons, I worked for him for two and a half years and I quit. And part of the reason that, anyway, I regret quitting. I should have stayed until he died only a few months later and I should have just stuck it out.

MO: So interesting. I once quit a job. I was working for an alcoholic who would come back from lunch having drunk a lot and be somewhat verbally abusive and not remember it the next day, and I quit. But I feel good about quitting, but I hear you. I hear you. Okay, two more. So is there a bit of advice that you typically give if you’re asked, say by a college student who’s heard you give a talk for advice on living? What do you say?

KO: On living?

MO: Or on writing or on anything or whatever advice?

KO: If somebody asked me for advice on how to live, I mean, I guess it’s kind of cliche to say right now, but I think the older I get, the more true it becomes. And I made some decisions in my life that set me up for this in a good way. But I think the less time you’re online, the better. I think don’t, don’t be online, just don’t try to do it and then pay her back. Just don’t do it in the first place.

MO: Have you seen that this is Sam Harris’s latest thing.

KO: Oh, I saw there was a line that was like, don’t be online.

MO: So I’m right about so little. I always make the point that I thought North Carolina Senator John Edwards was going to be president. Remember when he was one of 12 people in the primary. I always picked the wrong horse. I have no predictive ability at all. But I did say, when I got offline seven years ago, this is coming. This will come where everyone will say, get offline. But at the time, even among sort of thought leader, pundits, whatever, where that would’ve been an interesting contrarian view, nobody was saying it because either they had utopian views of what online could be or because they thought it was so necessary to living or it was like nobody was saying it.

KO: Yeah, I never joined. I never joined anything. So I wasn’t on Facebook in college and I got a lot of grief about it, and I don’t think it was a really thought out decision. I think it was just something that I did and then all of a sudden everyone was making fun of me for it. So I leaned into it and I think that was a good, that is something that I really do not regret.

MO: I think that’s wrong. I think you had a wisdom. I really do, because …

KO: Thank you.

MO: It’s so easy to join Facebook and the number of people who didn’t, lots of people joined and then didn’t do much with it.

KO: Yeah.

MO: But the number of people who never joined is so vanishingly small that I do think that they had some little voice whispering to them and saying, this is not how to live, and I’m jealous of them. I think they have wisdom in some way that probably helps them in other areas of life too. So I just think that’s true.

KO: Thank you.

MO: And finally, is there a particular song that you’re very nostalgic for that brings you back to a particular moment when you hear it?

KO: I am not a very musically motivated person. I can think of a few of them, but the one I’m going to pick right now is there’s a Mordechai Ben David song I think, it’s called Shiru Lamelech, and he’s singing it on a rooftop in Jerusalem with a bunch of kind, it looked like Yeshiva guys, but maybe a little hippie Israel, and they’re …

MO: Wearing the Reb Nachman kippah.

KO: Yeah, there’s somebody who’s, there’s guy who’s clearly a from, but he’s wearing a kind of a hip elvin sort of vest and playing wooden flute. I don’t remember. It must have just come on an automatic YouTube or something when my eldest was little and I was trying to find music to pacify him. And it’s such an earworm and it takes me back not only to that moment where it came on and it was like a fun song to play with him, but also to all the moments since then in my family life that we’ve put it on or that it’s come on. And then we’re like … it’s a combination of, oh, I’m so happy to hear this song, and no, it’s never going to get out of my head for the next two years. So I would say that.

MO: Now of course, I’ll have to go listen to it and then it’ll never leave my head. Kelsey Osgood, the book is “Godstruck: Seven Women’s Unexpected Journeys to Religious Conversion.” It’s awesome. It’s totally, as my daughter would say, amazeballs and I love it. And thanks for being my guest.

KO: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

MO: So much fun. Kelsey Osgood is the author of “Godstruck.” You can get it wherever fine books are available. Thanks for listening to Arc: The Podcast. Before I say farewell for today, I want to remind you that the Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shvat is February first and second. February 4 is World Cancer Day, which isn’t a religious holiday, but is a day somebody made it up. And honestly, there’s not much else going on in terms of world religious holidays. I mean, there’s some saints days because there’s always saints days, but it feels like religion sort of took the winter off, or at least the winter of the Northern Hemisphere off and stuff gets kicking again with the sort of Easter/Passover season. But meantime, we wish you a happy solstice. We wish you a happy New Year’s afterglow, and we want to wish happy Birthday to some celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, whose birthday is January 29. Philip Glass, otherwise known as the cousin of Ira Glass, and a famous dude in his own right, January 31 is his birthday. Justin Timberlake, JT, also January 31. Laura Dern, February 10, and Elizabeth Banks February 10. I want to say something about Elizabeth Banks. Not only is she like me from Western Massachusetts, she’s a Landsman, she’s a homie, but also she’s one of the most interesting cases of, is she or isn’t she a Jew? When I was a Tablet magazine and on our old podcast Unorthodox, we used to give shout outs to celebrity Jews, among other things that we did. There was periodically some discussion about whether Elizabeth Banks was Jewish. She was not born and raised Jewish, but she’d married a Jewish dude, who I think she met at Penn, and she periodically would give comments to the media about how she was all in for Judaism and she had a Jewish family and she was proud to be among the people and stuff, but it’s not clear that she ever converted. Now I’m not out there looking to prove who is or who isn’t. I’m not like the kosher certifier for converts. That would be Kelsey Osgood if it were anyone. She wrote the book after all, but it was just always so great that Elizabeth Banks, who is such a massive talent and is so funny, might be one of the tribe. So regardless, happy birthday to Elizabeth Banks on February 10.

Happy Winter to you all. Thank you for listening to Arc: The Podcast. I’m Mark Oppenheimer, and I have such good colleagues at the Danforth Center. They include Debra Kennard, Abram Van Engen, and Mark Valeri. I have great interns, Caroline Coffey and Ben Esther and I have a great editor and co-producer and general jack-of-all-trades, David Sugarman, who works with me at Arc Magazine, which you should go read. It’s at arcmag.org. Til next time, I’m Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Arc: The Podcast.