Marching Forth Following KPR Interview

Anybody out there got connections with KCUR (the regional NPR station in Kansas City)?

Just had an empowering 45-minute interview with the manager of Kansas Public Radio. Will let you know when it's aired, where it will be available on line, and how you can help get it (or something similar) into the larger NPR arena in the weeks to come.

Dan Skinner was great to work with. Definitely not like a couple of challenging characters I encountered in 1993-94--some so right-winged with ulterior motives than mine--which I "wrote up" in Enlarging Boston's Spotlight . He'll have to edit out about 2/3 of the content, including a time or two when I got deeper into sub-topics than I intended, like collusion in the publishing industry.

That's the beauty of not being live, though, as I usually was in the scores of interviews I did over twenty years ago.

 I spent a lot of time talking about issues with Protestants not having big enough pockets, about the gender oppression that keeps Catholic girls and the majority of Protestant teens from feeling they can speak up even today, or take a case into the courts. How young female Protestants are still getting bought off to keep us from connecting the dots.

 He asked the age-old question, which is a good one that I have refused to use as a platform to dictate in some authoritarian way that over-simplifies and puts us all the in same mold. Like a good therapist, I do not believe in doing it that way.

I think he phrased it as "What should we do about all we're hearing (from Hollywood and elsewhere about sexual harassment or on-going abuse in the church)?" My answer was three-fold:

"Talk, talk, talk, talk--just like you and I are doing now and stay committed to the conversations.

 "Avoid the tendency to go back to sleep like the world has done so fast with each newsworthy story that has given us opportunity after opportunity, not only in the Church, but through those opportunities we may have missed from 1991 with Anita Hill to Penn State to Baylor.

 "Search your soul. Take ownership of these problems when you run into them. Speak up. Take action. Just do something to confront the complicity that surrounds us all. You'll figure it out."



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