On Real America, with Abe Sauer: Garrison Keillor Will Die
Abe @ 148: I suspect you have Keillor's grounds for disliking Unitarians pegged, which does him no favors:
1) It's Unitarian Universalist, not Unitarian.
2) We don't claim to be Christian, just that we roots in Christian heresies dating nearly back to biblical time, with Arianism on one side and Clement and Origen on the other.
3) The most recent survey I've seen on the subject indicates atheism is a minority position among UUs. Among the atheist UUs I know, I am probably in a minority in being a straight-up materialist. My minister's wife, also a minister but for a different congregation, describes herself quite vividly as a "spiritual atheist" and makes it quite clear there's a nonmaterial aspect to what she believes.
4) I feel in good company to be singled out along with Jews and pagans in Keillor's essay. My kind of folks.
5) Garrison Keillor is entitled to whatever view of Jesus he cares to hold, but that doesn't make Jesus his property. Garrison Keillor can take my Jesus when he pries it out of my cold dead fingers.
(Okay, those last two points are me, not Keillor, but it's hard for a math guy to quit with the numbering.)
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On Real America, with Abe Sauer: Garrison Keillor Will Die
I'm glad you found it useful.
I, too, am a listener to his show* who remembers both the show that first caught my attention and the show that finally lost my sympathies. There's still a lot I like about him, and I still listen.
It's an interesting question whether the difference between Keillor in performance and Keillor in print is more about craft--he's good at playing his parts on the show--or about radio being a collective medium.
In print, he's got one editor between him and the world**. In radio, dozens of are people work on the production. Feedback from sheer numbers helps get tone right, by helping avoid tone errors.
*who listened Saturday to see if Keillor would comment on this question, which he certainly did.
**though some local papers trimmed parts of his column this time around.