Strange Arrivals is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey.

For the best experience, listen with headphones. In the

in the course of doing research for this season of strange arrivals, I ran across the book The Believer

Encounters with the Beginning, the end, and our place in the middle by

Sarah Krasnstein. Like strange arrivals, it is concerned with issues of belief but approaches

the topic a little differently.

Here's my interview with Sarah. We talk about the Creation Museum,

UFO Experiences, and people who will come to your house

in cleansed of evil or just annoying spirits.

My name is Sarah Krasnstein and I am a writer

and you will find that I have a very strange hybrid accent because I am a dual American Australian citizen and I've spent probably about half my life in each country by this point and I often forget

what's the right word for the right country and we're in the liminal podcast space so I guess

that doesn't matter but I'm flagging it that's me.

Was the impetus behind writing this book?

So it's probably generous to describe it as a process but with each of my kind of book length work so far, it really just starts off as something that's not really even intellectualized. It's just a feeling that these are interesting stories that deserve kind of more

than a magazine type treatment and that if they're willing, these people that have kind of sparked my curiosity or interest I would like over you know the

next indefinite period which so far is shaken out to about four years each book to get to know them like see the world through their eyes their

interior life and with the believer it was disclosed over the process of those kind of four-year interviews, that it was different people speaking

from vastly different perspectives about the grief in the gap between the world as it intractably is and the world as we love it to be and what they did to make that gap cognitively or spiritually work for them.

How did that become apparent to you?

Well, again, like I say, it's just like, and this is difficult because before I wrote full time,

I was a lawyer and I have a PhD in criminal appeals.

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