But like most conversations worth having, it didn’t stay where it started!

We ended up talking about why some books don’t leave you alone. Not because they make you feel better, but because they tell you the truth. Tolkien does that. He doesn’t smooth things over. He doesn’t give you a neat ending. He shows you what it costs to love anything.

Michael has spent years teaching Tolkien. He knows the material cold. But what stayed with me wasn’t merely the scholarship, but the way he talks about why this work matters in a human sense.

We talked about students. There’s this assumption now that younger people are too distracted, too ironic, too detached for something like Tolkien, but that hasn’t been his experience. He sees the opposite. He sees people who are looking for something solid. Something that isn’t just pulled apart and explained away.

And Tolkien meets them there.

We talked about beauty. Not the easy version of it. Not decoration. The harder kind. The kind that takes something out of you to make, and something out of you to really see. The kind that stays with you a little.

And we talked about loss.

Michael lost his son. That’s in the room whether you say it or not. You can hear it in how he speaks. Not in any dramatic way. Just in the steadiness of someone who has been through something that doesn’t resolve.

Tolkien knew that territory.

It’s in everything he wrote. That sense that something has already slipped away. That even when something is saved, something else is gone. That you can return home and still feel like you don’t quite belong there anymore.

Frodo comes back to the Shire, but he can’t live in it. That’s not just part of the story. That’s something true.

Michael talks about that feeling. Being at home and not at home at the same time.

We talked about ruins and what they stand for. Something broken that’s still there. Something that holds the memory of what used to be.

That may be as close as Tolkien gets to hope.

Something you can still stand in front of and recognize.

This wasn’t really a conversation about Tolkien in the usual sense.

It was about why certain stories become part of your life, and why you keep going back to them.

At the center of it all is a difficult question: how does a society lose its way, and can we find it again?

LINKS

https://www.beckygarrison.com

Gaslighting For God

But it wasn’t.

And now we’re looking at something that was there all along and just wasn’t taken seriously.

American Dominion: The Rise and Radicalization of a New Christendom

Why do some of us resist hearing parts of our own history at all?

LINKS

on Substack

https://www.matthewdaviswriter.com

Not just what’s happening in America. But what America is doing to the rest of the world.

Mike traces how our culture wars, our politics, our media habits, even our tone, are showing up in places like Ireland. And what that looks like when it lands.

We talk about the Dublin riots.

We talk about Trump and the permission structure he created.

We talk about tech platforms, misinformation, and the slow normalization of anger.

How this spreads. Why it works. And what it costs.

LINKS

Watch on Apple TV: Amplified: The Exportation of the Culture Wars

https://www.immikesheridan.com/about

We talk about his book From Dropout to Doctorate, but really we talk about what it means to grow up with fear, to carry trauma, and to decide not to pass it on.

He was sitting on top of a refrigerator right before we talked. It’s his way of calling attention to hunger in America.

We talk about children. About what we give them. About what we don’t.

And we talk about something simple and difficult at the same time.

Becoming a healed and healing version of yourself.

If you’ve ever had to work your way out of where you came from, this conversation is for you.

https://terencelester.com

In the second hour we stop diagnosing and start asking what now. Becky talks about why she’s still hopeful in spite of everything, and we get into the limits of satire in a culture that already feels like parody. We talk about the collapse of celebrity-driven leadership, the exhaustion people feel with national politics, and why real change may be happening in smaller, local, less visible ways. It’s less about movements and more about relationships. Less about influence and more about staying human.

LINKS

https://www.beckygarrison.com

Gaslighting For God

Let me just say this plainly. This is a terrific novel. I love it.

What drew me in is not just that setting, but what happens inside it, because at the center of all that money and power is a young woman, Hannah Caulfield, who makes a decision to keep her child despite pressure from everyone around her. The book takes on big themes like pregnancy, illness, caregiving, and faith, but not as theory. It is all lived experience, and that is what makes it work. It cuts through the intellectualizing and gets to something real about love, responsibility, and the choices that define a life.

LINKS

Where Snowbirds Play at Bookshop

https://www.ginagoldhammer.com

In this conversation, I talk with my friend, writer Kate Cohen, about her new Substack project “Scratch,” a meditation on what we make, and why the act of making may be essential to human life.

From baking biscuits and sewing clothes to building stone walls and raising food, Kate explores the deep satisfaction of creating things ourselves. In a culture increasingly shaped by AI, automation, and mass production, “Scratch” asks a simple but radical question: What if the most meaningful things in life are the things we make ourselves?

You don’t have to choose. Subscribe to both of us!

Now that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested for his involvement, on his birthday, no less, I hope this Conversation will help give you the context of the times we are in, and that you will share it widely with your own networks.

From the Founders to the Supreme Court, from Roger Williams to modern Christian nationalism, this discussion dismantles the myth that America was founded as a Christian nation and reveals how and why evangelicals have benefited most from religious freedom.

Get the Book: America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State

Follow Laura’s Substack

https://www.lkfield.com

LINK

https://www.billkolebooks.com

Drawing on decades of humanitarian work, Sharon reflects on accountability, choice, faith, and why good intentions alone are not enough. We talk about suffering not as an abstract problem, but as something that asks something of us in our communities, our institutions, and our daily lives.

This is a thoughtful discussion about responsibility, humility, and the quiet power of doing small things with great love.

LINKS

Just Serve: https://www.justserve.org/

50 Prompts: https://shdwmtn.com/50Prompts

12 Principles: https://shdwmtn.com/12SmallThings

Book/Amazon: https://shdwmtn.com/SmallThingsAmazon

Book/Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/a/99692/9781639934287

Watch Apocalypse in the Tropics

Journalist and author Melanie D.G. Kaplan joins me for a conversation about her book Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research.

It’s also our December pick for It Has to Be Read.

At the center of the story is Hammy—a former lab dog who survived isolation, fear, and trauma, and went on to teach lessons about forgiveness, patience, joy, and what it truly means to be alive.

This episode explores:

• The hidden reality of animal research in the U.S.

• Why tens of thousands of dogs are still used in labs

• How love and companionship can rehabilitate trauma

• What dogs teach humans about forgiveness and presence

• Why compassion may be our last shared moral language

If you love dogs, care about ethics, or believe stories can change the world, I hope you’ll watch, listen, and share.

In this episode of In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer, I speak with William Taubman and Philip Taubman about their new book, McNamara At War: A New History, which is our December It Has to Be Read. selection.

William Taubman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian. Philip Taubman is a longtime journalist and former New York Times Washington bureau chief and associate editor. Together, they’ve gone back through diaries, letters, declassified documents, and interviews that were never fully used before. What they found is a more complicated and more troubling picture of Robert McNamara than we’ve had until now.

McNamara helped escalate the Vietnam War even as he came to believe it could not be won. Our conversation looks closely at how that happened, why he stayed silent for so long, and what that silence cost us all.

For me, this isn’t abstract. I lived through the Vietnam era, and years later my own son served as a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan and Iraq. As we now watch Donald Trump blowing up and seizing boats in a march toward conflict with Venezuela, it’s hard not to notice how often the same patterns repeat themselves.

Share

McNamara At War is our December It Has to Be Read. because it doesn’t just explain a war we lost.

It forces us to reckon with why we keep losing them.

I have been making videos lately about the insanity of American politics, Trump rising again, cruelty rising with him, and I realized I was holding my breath. Diana’s book let me breathe again. It reminded me I could step out of the madness into another shape of time. A human shape. A sacred one, even if I am not always sure what that word means anymore.

So when Diana and I sat down for this conversation, I was already carrying the kind of gratitude you feel toward someone who hands you a blanket while you are shivering in a doorway.

Then she read this line:

“We may emphasize Savior, Messiah, Lord… but the most amazing word is ‘born.’”

Born.

God, if you are willing to use the word without flinching, is born.

Not hovering.

Not thundering.

Born.

Into a young woman’s torn, exhausted, probably terrified body. And as Diana said, the cattle may have been lowing, but Mary was moaning, because childbirth is pain before it is poetry. And somehow this is where the Christian story insists hope begins.

Honestly, that knocks me down harder than all the theology I learned growing up inside evangelical show business.

Here is the thing about Diana. She can talk about this without sounding like she is selling anything. She can talk about Mary with reverence while admitting childbirth is messy and dangerous. She can tell you “fear not” without making it into a slogan. She can talk about God without pretending she floats six inches above the ground.

Maybe that is why I trust her. And trust is rare these days.

When she said the Christian calendar is portable, something clicked. You can carry this yourself. Advent to Christmas to Epiphany to Lent and beyond, right into your own kitchen, your own messy heart, your own doubt-ridden version of faith.

I am 73 and I have drifted through more spiritual neighborhoods than most people visit in a lifetime. Evangelical. Orthodox. Atheist Who Prays. I have lived all of those labels. And yet reading Diana’s book, I realized something simple and a little embarrassing.

I did not have an Advent wreath.

Not even a small one.

So now I am going to make one. Cut some pine from the yard. Light the candles. Not because I suddenly believe everything literally. But because I remembered that time, sacred time, can be a lifeline.

Across three decades of practice, Dr. Taylor has walked families through ALS, Parkinson’s, dementia, addiction, traumatic brain injury, concussions, and devastating strokes — including the massive stroke that took her own brother. She and Frank go deep on:

• How women are routinely dismissed and “gaslit” in medical settings

• Her own almost-missed endometrial cancer, brushed off as “just stress”

• The emotional cost of telling families the worst news a human can hear

• Why she nearly quit medicine after her mother died in an ICU

• How journaling kept her from burning out and became the seed of this book

• The AIDS crisis, her colleague George, and the cruelty of stigma

• Addiction, overdoses, and declaring young patients brain dead

• The hidden danger of youth sports concussions and second-impact syndrome

• Near-death experiences, souls, and why she believes something comes after this life

• Prancer the therapy dog: intuitive diagnoses, comforting the paralyzed, and “angels in fur”

Shop the It Has to Be Read. Book Club List