Welcome listeners to the First Things podcast, the editor's desk.

This is Rusty Reno at First Things World headquarters here in New York with Justin Lee, who teaches undergraduate writing at

University of California, Irvine, and who penned a piece in the May 2022 issue, Holy Fear,

about the limits of evangelical anti-fundamentalism, I suppose.

Welcome to the podcast, Justin.

Thank you, Rusting. I'm excited to be here.

Now, I would be remiss were I not to chastise any listener who's not currently a subscriber to First Things magazine that all the cool kids

subscribe to First Things.

So if you're a listener and you're not a subscriber to First Things, run, don't walk to the nearest

computer and log on to First Things.com and go to Subscribe now.

Okay, we've got that, that we've got that ad campaign

out of the way, Justin. And, you know, one thing I really like about the piece is the little

autobiobiography. And you open up with a interesting figure, Mad Max. Was that his real name?

Or is that the name? Well, that's what people called him. And I don't think one ever chooses

the name Mad Max. Yeah, I think Mad Max himself did not choose Mad Max and Mad Max.

But he embraced it.

He embraced it apparently.

He was apparently, or at least was a fairly well-known kind of circuit preacher who, you know, would go around the country doing his you know fire and brimstone

shtick at universities but but he was I think local to Terre Haute or at

least the Terre Haute area if I remember correctly he passed a few years back

so he was a regular figure.

Yeah, yeah.

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