"The Chickens Come Home to Roost": a podcast with Christopher Altieri
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May 14, 2020Last week I had the wonderful opportunity to appear on the podcast of Christopher Altieri which is but one part of his sprawling journalistic empire. Christopher is the Rome bureau chief and international editor for The Catholic Herald. You'll also see his byline in other publications, especially the Catholic World Report. He was also, in a former life, a reporter with Vatican Radio, which is where he was working when I first met him around 2012. He and his wife, and I with mine, had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant near Piazza Navona in Rome. But for the most part, we have gotten to know each other via social media and he has been an invaluable help to me in writing these initial blogs since he is one of the best copy editors around and has caught some rather embarrassing grammatical and spelling errors in the posts I have sent to him. My hope was that he would find my posts so overwhelmingly splendid in every way that he would send me vast sums of money and endless access to the Scavi tour at the Vatican. Instead, he did me the greater honor of taking my ramblings seriously and, therefore, taking the time to help me make them better. And for that I am deeply grateful.
I have decided therefore to devote this latest blog post to his podcast. The first part of the program features an interview with Annie Mitchell Egan of the Son Rise Morning Show on Rome's transparency failures. I did not know that the podcast would begin with this conversation, but I am most glad that it did. The conversation is blunt and bracing and is well worth a listen. Christopher is a great interviewer and knows just what questions to ask. Good stuff indeed. His interview with me begins around minute 32 of the podcast and involves a discussion of my decision to leave academia in order to start a Catholic Worker Farm with my wife Carrie. Why anyone would be even remotely interested in following the ravings of a failed academic-turned failed farmer is beyond me, but Christopher does a really good job of making me appear competent and mildly important. I hope you enjoy listening to the interview as much as I enjoyed participating in it.
I do regret the fact that I made one glaring omission in my conversation with Christopher. I noted that my wife is involved in the transcription project which is a group effort to transcribe Dorothy Day’s voluminous private correspondences from handwritten notes to computerized records. But my wife is also a member of the advisory committee of the Dorothy Day Guild, which is the primary organization devoted to promoting her canonization. And please note: my wife did not pressure me into making this correction. The fact is she is far more interesting than I am, and Christopher should have interviewed her instead of me. She is also much, much better looking.
But with that caveat in place, I do think that the vision of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin is as relevant today as it was when they started the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930’s. Therefore, I want to thank Christopher for helping to promote their vision by allowing me to use his media platform in order to make the message more widely known. Christopher is a consummate professional. But more importantly, he is my friend and my wife and I thank him for giving us this opportunity.
You can link to the podcast here. Enjoy!