Thoughts on a Meaningful Life
PW Talks with Bob Abernethy and William Bole
by Jana Riess -- Publishers Weekly, 2/12/2007
Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly will celebrate its 10th anniversary this fall. Bob, as the program's founder, did you ever expect it would last this long, or that it would result in a book of interviews?
Abernethy: Neither. We were so busy trying to do it each week, and to increase the number of PBS stations that would carry us. We've been fronted each year by the Lilly endowment. Who knew back then that they would fund us for 10 years? The book is concerned, that really wasn't a gleam in our eyes until a couple of years ago. Over the years, we've talked to a lot of wonderful people. And we would use little bits on the air, and also on the Web site, but most of the interviews just sat in the videotape library. We realized we had some wonderful stuff there.
Bill, as co-editor for this project, what was involved in editing these interviews for publication?
Bole: It was an improbable idea of how to put a book together, based on field transcripts from TV interviews. They were intended originally, but sound bites. In a TV interview, you have only a few minutes. But these field transcripts could run a hundred pages; they sometimes talked for hours. So we would go through these transcripts, trying to see which would translate best as a spoken essay.
Choosing only about 60 of these interviews must have been hard. What were the ones that got away?
Bole: I've thought of a few more that I wish we could have included, like Annie Dillard and Kathleen Norris. Then there were a few people I thought would be good speaking from an explicitly agnostic perspective, like Robert Solomon, if we had more time and didn't think of it so late.
Abernethy: One of the most interesting and effective interviews for me was one I did with Frederick Buechner. That's not in the book, unfortunately.
Is there an overarching theme to the collection?
Abernethy: It's not all people who would call themselves religious—some say they're spiritual but not necessarily religious. The cumulative effect is that these practical people, who are not hermits or saints but are very active and engaged in the world, disclose in the course of these conversations a sense of God and another dimension. Many of them call it "something more," something beyond the material. It was really moving for me and I hope it will be for many others. They have this extraordinary depth because they have thought a lot and put into practice their fundamental belief that the physical world is not all there is.
