Brad and Dan are in the same room! Recording SWAJ in person! It's the first time since 2019 and so they take the opportunity to do a primer on all things SWAJ: the origin story of the show, the rundown of all the series they've done in the past and are planning for the future, the books they've written, the live event coming up in Denver, and why Brad is a California cliche and Dan is a walking dad joke.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB.
And I'm not only here today with my co-host, I'm literally here with my co-host, Dan Miller, sitting next to him.
We haven't done this in a long time, Dan, in terms of recording in the same room, so it's pretty amazing.
Yeah, so it's the first time in, like, what, I don't know, two or three years, probably, and also no masks, which is just kind of exciting.
So, yeah, Brad has made it to the balmy Northwest, where it's, I hear, a little bit cooler than California.
It's like 60 degrees, and Brad right now is wearing a puffer jacket and, like, a hat in my house, so.
It's not quite that bad.
Well, you said Northwest, like you still live in Seattle.
Oh, I did say Northwest.
All right.
We've got a special episode today.
We want to give everyone a primer on Straight White American Jesus.
We've been doing this show, Dan, this is crazy, since 2018.
And since then, we've done just about 350 episodes, which is ridiculous, something we never thought would happen.
But we realized that we had not done a kind of an explainer of this show in a long time.
So if you've been listening for a year, if you've been listening for a month, you might have picked up on what we do and kind of parts of our story.
But you probably don't know kind of where this podcast came from, what we get up to every kind of week.
Dan and I's histories in terms of our being ministers and then becoming professors and all the things we talk about kind of glancingly, like we both have books we've written that we want to talk about, we have a big event coming up in Denver, blah blah blah blah blah.
We want to explain all that today on this kind of special episode where Dan and I are actually sitting in the same room.
So Dan, here's where we need to start.
Where did you and I meet?
This is, this sounds like a dating show or something, but, um, you know, let's tell people.
I was going to say, it's like, it's like the app where you're like, you know, single white person, like looking for, you know, podcasting partner something.
Um, yeah, but no, I, so yeah, so.
And just as you said, I know some folks have heard parts of this, but we're aware that We're going into our fifth year, so some people have heard this, some people haven't.
But yeah, so we met.
It's kind of weird.
We were both studying at Oxford, but at different times, and I had been there before you were there.
We had these common friends, and I think everybody was like, oh, Brad's kind of weird, and there was this other weird guy named Dan who used to be here.
You two should meet.
And so I went back to Oxford to a conference.
I was studying at Syracuse at the time.
There that we met and realized we both had this similar, really, really weird background that has sort of informed everything we've been doing since then.
We've been friends since and, you know, maybe start with there with some of the background.
So Brad, how did you wind up at Oxford and why was that significant for you?
So I think the thing that you and I share is that we were, I actually think we have some similar, some real similarities in our background.
So one of them is Both of us were at Oxford to do master's degrees, but neither of us came from families that were kind of like well-tread in elite higher education.
They're not academic families.
There are a lot of people in academia whose parents and grandparents, like their generations of college professors, and that was not either one of us.
So, you know, I know I didn't always feel like I fit in there.
I was a big learning curve.
Like I had to figure out how to like, you know, wear dress clothes all the time and, you know, eat fancy food.
You know, people would ask me if I wanted a glass of wine and I would just pretend I knew like, oh, yeah, of course I do this all the time.
No problem.
So when I got to Oxford, somebody was like, there's a guy who really I think you'd get along with really well.
This was in 2005, but he literally just left this summer.
And I was like, and everyone kept telling me about Dan Miller.
And then my friend, our mutual friend, Matt, Matt's like a really good friend of mine to this day, was like, yeah, you know, you would have loved Dan.
Dan's kind of different, though.
Like when I first met Dan, he had really long hair and tattoos.
I thought that he had probably killed like 14 people because he was very scary.
And then he like tore his pectoral muscle trying to bench press 400 pounds.
So that was the thing.
And I was like, OK, yeah, this I'm not sure why you guys think I need to meet this guy, but that sounds great.
If you fast forward, Dan.
So let me actually just say one more thing.
We were both ministers.
So like we went from church to becoming ministers and you were a minister in the Northwest.
I was a minister down in Southern California and we kind of shared this story of like leaving evangelicalism and becoming theologians in essence, right?
And then we both left kind of theology and became religious studies professors, which is a whole different ballgame.
And so we had this sort of similar track, even though, you know, we have some real differences about us in terms of where we grew up and all that kind of stuff.
But let's get back to where we met.
So it's 2000, I believe it is 2009.
And you'd been gone from Oxford a couple years by now.
I'd heard all about you.
I'd been gone from Oxford.
We both were back in Oxford for a big conference and we finally met and I felt like I already knew you because I'd heard so much about you.
We go to this very fancy conference at a very fancy Oxford college.
The kind of place that feels like Hogwarts.
We kind of hung out the whole time.
And then, I'll just be very honest, the last night was like the big conference dinner.
And at this point, Dan, I don't know about you.
You had like a one-year-old.
You were a grad student in Syracuse.
I was a grad student at UC Santa Barbara where I did my PhD.
Neither of us had a lot of money.
And so we're in that stage of life where it's like, hey, free food, free wine.
I'll take all of that.
I'll put some in my bag, take it home.
And we ended up sitting at the end of this table at an Oxford College at night at this conference dinner, and there was a whole decanter of port.
In front of us.
And like when you have no money and you know, you've traveled 6,000 miles to get to a conference, you're like, well, we might as well drink that.
And we did.
We did.
I think we drank.
I'm not going to lie.
I think you drank three quarters of it and I drank a quarter of it.
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