Conversations with Coleman

Did any single man change the course of the 20th century? Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, says the biographies can’t answer that, but the data can. He walks us through Winston Churchill’s dayslong fight to keep Britain in the war, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, John F. Kennedy’s brinkmanship in Cuba, and Joseph Stalin’s response to Adolf Hitler’s invasion. Then he explains why basketball coaches are the best laboratory we have for measuring what a leader really changes.
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Megan Phelps-Roper grew up as the public face of the Westboro Baptist Church, the hate group founded by her grandfather, known for picketing veterans’ funerals with signs condemning gay people and Jews. She left the church in 2012 after a series of Twitter conversations exposed cracks in its theology she could no longer ignore.

Since then, she’s built a new career exploring faith, belief, and public discourse from multiple angles, including as host of The Free Press’s The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. Now, somewhat surprisingly, she’s launched a new podcast called Book Keeper, where she returns to Bible stories she grew up with and tries to figure out which parts of them still hold up, and which don’t.

She joins Coleman Hughes to talk through the exact verse that unraveled her worldview, why she still reads Scripture to her kids despite not believing in God, and why she thinks a society that abandons fixed values is just as dangerous as one that enforces the wrong ones.

Book Keeper is a Longview original series. Listen at longview.report/bookkeeper

For the Bart Ehrman lecture that Coleman mentioned in the show, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CU1EZv-pFo
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Megan Phelps-Roper grew up as the public face of the Westboro Baptist Church, the hate group founded by her grandfather, known for picketing veterans’ funerals with signs condemning gay people and Jews. She left the church in 2012 after a series of Twitter conversations exposed cracks in its theology she could no longer ignore.

Since then, she’s built a new career exploring faith, belief, and public discourse from multiple angles, including as host of The Free Press’s The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. Now, somewhat surprisingly, she’s launched a new podcast called Book Keeper, where she returns to Bible stories she grew up with and tries to figure out which parts of them still hold up, and which don’t.

She joins Coleman Hughes to talk through the exact verse that unraveled her worldview, why she still reads Scripture to her kids despite not believing in God, and why she thinks a society that abandons fixed values is just as dangerous as one that enforces the wrong ones.

Book Keeper is a Longview original series. Listen at longview.report/bookkeeper

For the Bart Ehrman lecture that Coleman mentioned in the show, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CU1EZv-pFo
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Elliot Kaufman’s new book, In the War Room, is an inside account of how Israel actually fought the war that followed October 7, 2023. A Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Kaufman spent the last two years reporting on the conflict and drew on documents recovered from Hamas, along with behind-the-scenes access to Israel’s top political, military, and intelligence leaders, to reconstruct decisions most of the public never saw. Kaufman explains why Hamas sincerely believed it could destroy Israel, why Hezbollah never launched the full-scale invasion Israel feared most, and why the bitter, often personal rivalry between Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, and Benny Gantz shaped nearly every major decision of the war. He also walks through what he considers Israel’s biggest unforced error—the two-month aid stoppage that fueled a global famine narrative—and how the war ultimately reshaped Hezbollah, Iran’s nuclear program, and the future of the Abraham Accords.
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Delano Squires spent 15 years working in D.C. government, including a stint in the city’s office of gun violence prevention, where he noticed the same story on repeat: Young black men were both victims and perpetrators of some of the worst crimes in the city. In his new book, The Vanishing Black Family, he argues that family structure, not policing, incarceration, or education policy, is the most consequential and least discussed driver of racial inequality in America today. Squires makes the case that slavery deformed the black family but didn’t destroy it, and that the real collapse came later, driven by the expansion of the welfare state and the rise of second-wave feminism. He joins Coleman Hughes to talk through the data, the history, and why he thinks black institutions, from churches to civil rights organizations, have avoided the issue entirely.
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