My recent post on John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration attracted the attention of Anthony Gill, the host of the Research on Religion podcast. It so happened that he had been considering doing an episode on Locke, and he asked me to come on the program to discuss this important figure. We recorded a conversation during the week of Thanksgiving, and the episode was published yesterday on the Research on Religion site.
I had a lot of fun with this, although I was flying by the seat of my pants. We did the interview on pretty short notice (about a week), less than two weeks after the birth of my fifth son; as a result, I wasn’t able to do any real preparation for it. Fortunately, I don’t think I made any major misstatements in the interview.
At any rate, if you have found this site via Research on Religion and are interested in my project to read through the Great Books of the Western World, please see the Great Books Project page.
The Western Tradition 
That was the entire strategy of the interview. Surprise him, get him off his game, and then go for the jugular! Prof. Jewell could not be flustered though and it was a great interview. And even before this posting he was able to drive a lot more traffic to the site!
Thanks Jason!
Dr. Gill is a great interviewer, except for that opening question about Faulkner and Star Trek; surely that was just an ice-breaker. Good job all around.
Fred,
You’re killing me here. That was a great opening question meant to draw in the Trekkie crowd and also to clear up any confusion that Faulkner was named after William Faulkner.
In all seriousness, I try to do an ice-breaker question like that as I like to have a bit of non-academic chat to take a guest out of the “academic jargon” mode. Having never interviewed Jason before, I didn’t know if he would be all serious and academic-y or if he could reach out in a more accessible way. It was the latter, but I have had a guest or two that found it hard to break out of the jargon-speak. I’ve also been told that some guests get pretty nervous about doing an hour-long interview, so this get them into a chat mode.
Tony
And stay tuned to the show on a regular basis because in about 2 weeks we debut an original song from one of my guests, plus a Christmas carol with some of the folks from my church. First time we ever had a guitar and lyrics on the show. It turned out really well!