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Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed (DVD) is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-gifts/4003804/Expelled-No-Intelligence-Allowed-DVD/

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Chris Cash: This is the catholic spotlight the podcast where we talk about what is new, cool and exciting in the catholic marketplace. I am your host Chris Cash director of ecommerce from catholiccompany.com your source for all your catholic needs.
Today in the spotlight we have Walt Ruloff he is producer of the exciting new movie. I guess exciting could be a relative term depending on how you look at documentaries, but I certainly think the subject matter is very exciting. It’s called expelled, no intelligence allowed starring Ben Stein and it is now available on DVD. Welcome Walt.
Walt Ruloff: Thank you very much for having me, I appreciate it.

Chris Cash: So Walt tell our listeners just a little bit about what Expelled is about?

Walt Ruloff: Well Expelled the thrust of Expelled is the, the situation over Darwinian evolution, primarily in the United States but really it is a global issue. Its impact on culture, its impact on education and foremost within our piece the impact within the academy because really that is where things are set, as far as direction and what is presented to high school students and to children and to educational, different educational areas within the country. So the story is about Ben Stein on a heroic journey looking into this massive debate and discovers that there is a whole host of scientists who have dared to cross the line and actually bring up the design hypothesis or the intelligent design hypothesis and discovers that they are expelled from their given area, their given discipline, either as a professor, a teacher or a researcher, and this inspires him to move on and then really kind of uncovers what is going on.

Along the way he meets up with the great atheists who have taken it to the extreme. Kind of the neo-Darwinist position to the extreme such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and P.Z. Myers and others and ultimately gets the courage to say I really need to do something about this and finally has a face off with a group of different policy makers and then ultimately Richard Dawkins and is one of the kind of the key climax which is extraordinary to what Ben is able to get out of Richard Dawkins and then goes from there.

Ben is really making a cry to, or plea to say, you know what we need to bring freedom into the academy. We need to have freedom in our research policy, freedom in our expression in what we find. We really need allow our researchers to go where the evidence may lead them, rather than trying to reposition everything within the given dogma or the given orthodoxy which currently is Darwinian orthodoxy.

Chris Cash: Right and to be clear this movie is not a defense of intelligent design as much as it an exposition of the persecution that comes along with anyone who says they might consider intelligent design as potentially valid in coming up with some results in any kind of research.

Walt Ruloff: That is exactly right, its, we see as producers we see the intelligent design movement as being really a clear symptom of a much deeper problem within the academy. What has made this country great and what has made the advancements in science something to marvel at is the ability to question the given paradigm in whatever area. That is really important to be able to do that. No matter how uncomfortable they make some people in their entrenched positions but that needs to be part of our academic process. So really the idea.

Chris Cash: That is what the academic process was built on, I mean the whole, I am electrical engineer by training I have done research in corporate environments as well as in the academic environment in college and I, you have to understand as a researcher the whole idea is lets question the published results and make sure that they stand up. So what go you started on this project in the first place? Whose idea was this to actually make a movie of it and how did you get Ben Stein on board.

Walt Ruloff: Yeah it is a great question. We, the origination of the idea was actually between myself and the other executive producer. His name is John Sullivan he is out of Los Angeles and our background is kind of from a technology position. I spent years building up a software company that became a de facto standard in the area of optimizational logistics which is really kind of a boring area within business to business transactions.

Chris Cash: Sounds interesting to me.

Walt Ruloff: Okay, as an electrical engineer I am sure it would be yeah. So we really prided ourselves on being able to push the envelope. One of our key directives was to obsolescence our current technology every six months and always to push the paradigm forward and we ended up having about three hundred researchers and a group at MIT and so forth. It was really very exciting. After I sold that company I got involved in Biotech and microbiology and research using the mechanisms that drive adaptation and drive change within the cell, and I was astounded. I originally got very excited about it, because through computer simulation and that kind of stuff and mapping what is actually happening in these trillions of transactions that are happening on an ongoing basis in the cell. I was very excited to get involved in this because I could really see the computer application, but what I soon discovered was is that you cant stray from the current paradigm. You can question the given orthodoxy which is neo-Darwinism which is basically based on random mutation and natural selection and the key area that I was interested in was questioning the whole area of the so called random mutation.

Well that, and if you do you cant get funding you cant get acceptance within given scientific bodies and there is just a whole host of problems that arise from that, if you don’t reposition your work back into that synthesis, into that orthodoxy, so I was very inspired. John and I were very inspired, we said we’ve got to you know get the word out there that this is a major problem, and this is not just an ideological clash but this is actually hurting science, and so one thing led to the next and so we ultimately decided to make a movie from that original position which is kind of crazy but we decided to make a movie.

Chris Cash: Now, you didn’t have any experience in film?

Walt Ruloff: No, no none, we surrounded ourselves with great filmmakers, great editors, great camera people, and a lot of people who have a lot of experience and that, and traditionally that is what an executive producer needs to do is, executive producer is in charge of the funding and the initial financing by putting together the team, putting together the talent and then figuring how to execute the project and then really letting the pros in the area of making film do their work and so that is what we did, was kind of coordinate the effort of lots and lots of people to come together to make this film.

Your second question was; how did we get Ben Stein on board. Well put together a list of criteria because we knew we needed a, we wanted I should say a famous celebrity type person that could be the host of this documentary and it is very difficult to find somebody that can actually take this on, that has the credibility to be able to take this on.

So some of our list of attributes was, we wanted a movie Hollywood star, a celebrity, somebody who is very very smart. Somebody who is very respected, hopefully funny, has a good sense of humor, that we could bring into this.

Chris Cash: As well as somebody who would be willing to do it which is probably an every harder task to surmount in Hollywood?

Walt Ruloff: Exactly, you know somebody that you know will lean a bit to right or at least be willing to.

Chris Cash: Whittles your list down significantly?

Walt Ruloff: Exactly, so that you know Ben Stein rose to the top, there were a few others but Ben Stein was the key person we finally met with him just outside of Seattle on one of his trips. He gave us ten minutes so we ended up spending four hours together, and he just immediately loved the concept and really, really wanted to take it on. Now the interesting this was, Ben Stein’s perspective and his passion over this issue is sanctity of human life, and that is why you see that big area in there about social Darwinism and its impact during the Nazi era.

Chris Cash: Oh and a Jew Ben would be extremely interested in that era in particular.

Walt Ruloff: Exactly, and so that was his position. We were coming from a position of academic freedom in science, and so we talked for a long time. So I think we can put both of these areas together and meet both of our objectives and so that was the, that was a big reason why we had those two main areas in the film. Because Ben is very passionate over that issue and believed that it ultimately all leads to how do we define a person, is there sanctity, is there as he calls it a spark of the divine within each person.

If there is not, well then all bets are off. As Nietzsche if there is no God, then anything is possible. So that was definitely his passion and we came together and we started filming and starting filming all over the world, it was an incredible process and we literally met who is who and interviewed who is who in the debate and then did a great job as you will see in the film.

Chris Cash: Now, did Ben write most of the movie himself or was there a writing team beside him. I know he is capable of doing that.

Walt Ruloff: Yeah, he is an excellent writer and has written many many books. He was one of the writers. We had about fifteen researchers, we had an original writing team of about four and but the key writer was a guy name Kevin Miller and then Ben Stein so they were the two key writers on putting together the voice over and the script. Now in the interviews we always had a list of questions that Ben and we would put together before we’d meet somebody like Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins or Sternberg who is in the beginning of the movie but Ben is so smart and so crafty that if he can find an area where for example with Richard Dawkins that he maybe weak on. Ben is actually a valedictorian from Yale law school is a litigator originally, he is also an economist, but he uses that training as a litigation lawyer to kind of circle in very kind of a subtle way the wagons around these people and then eventually tightens the noose with some strong questioning and you see that also when he really kind of hones in on the origin of life and one of the researchers actually talks about that life could have emerged on the backs of crystals. So things like that we were able to bring out because of Ben’s prowess and skill and in the interviewing process.

Chris Cash: Was that there anything that you found really surprising as you made this movie in terms of just learning from the people that you interviewed or even your own research that you did in setting this up.

Walt Ruloff: I think the biggest thing that surprised us all was just the sheer hatred from that entrenched Darwinist side from anybody that may question or challenge that position. We were most, most surprised by that, by that level of anger and in some cases just sheer anger, sheer hatred. We would interview people, afterwards we would be attacked by all sides, by you know telling us that we did it under false pretence and everything else and it was ridiculous because we went through a very methodical process of giving them the questions upfront paying most of these people, they all signed a release. They, it was something we took something very, very seriously because we knew it was controversial but we didn’t understand the kind of the fact that we were touching something that goes very, very deep within these people and it would drive such anger from them. So I think that was probably the biggest thing that was of surprise to us and in fact it got so bad as you know after the film was released we released it on April 18th of 2008 of this year.

Then Monday, the following Monday we were sued in federal court and in state court by Yoko Ono and then we also had some other lawsuits that were dealing with. It was just incredible how angry people were.

Chris Cash: Right, the suit was over the use of one of John Lennon’s songs in the movie.

Walt Ruloff: Correct and there is another good case, Yoko Ono is well aware of fair use copyright law in the United States, it is very well established their lawyers knew it, but she was just very, very angry and thought she would go for it. I mean we literally destroyed her in court. She lost both in federal and in state.

Chris Cash: I imagine the lawsuit was more to intimidate movie theatres from showing the movie, than it was to actually win any damages.

Walt Ruloff: Yes, exactly it was really to try to do that and plus kind of kybosh or our efforts and you know she was successful to a certain degree, because we were unable to support the movie as we would have liked to after it was in the theater. We had another host of cash available to us to support the film and once that litigation hit we had to pull back and focus on that litigation so and you know we are not finished with her yet. We are going to continue this fight on, but so going back to your original question. That was a big surprise to us.

Chris Cash: Okay well we are going to take a minute here to hear from our sponsor and in just a minute we will back with Walt Ruloff to talk more about Expelled no intelligence allowed. This is the catholic spotlight.

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We are back on the catholic spotlight with Walt Ruloff talking about Expelled no intelligence allowed starring Ben Stein the excellent new DVD just out that will tell you all about the persecutions that go along with intelligent design theory considered in any way in any type of academia in fact we were talking just a minute ago about the absolute hatred for those who would bring up intelligent design theory among some in the academic community. I even had my own personal experience with that, back when Expelled was first coming out into the theatres. I made a blog post about the movie and about my thoughts on intelligent design theory. I included a trailer for the movie, over at inspirational archive.com, my other blog and I within a couple of days, had a couple of different hate posts responding to it, which the posts really were just flat denials of everything without any real meat to them but it certainly showed that they, those who are on the side of Darwinism certainly want to push their agenda and they look for any chance they can to do that.

Walt Ruloff: Yes, we have had many, many similar experiences and as you see in the movie too Chris. The same thing happened to those scientists but it was much more serious to those scientists because now you are talking about their career and their livelihoods and income to pay their you know their ongoing expenses, are all threatened. But we put up also on our website, expelled the movie.com Ben has a blog and Ben would write these one pagers about what he is dealing with and in this movie what are some of the key areas that he is focusing we found ourselves having to kind of go through the actual blog responses because there was a high percentage of them that were filled with profanity and just oozing hatred and we just couldn’t post those. Now 99% we just let go through but there was this large group that was, it was just unbelievable, it was off the charts and so, and then the ones that we did let through that didn’t have that profanity, about fifty percent of them in some cases were also just filled with just a high degree of anger. So yeah, I am not glad, but so he has experienced the same thing.

Yeah, now the amazing thing is I think the bottom line here is this is not over Darwinian evolution, this issue when it comes right down to it, is over something much, much deeper and right now our society and our system within the academy and within law and within politics, is that the position of faith or the position of the belief in a divine or in the case of these scientists the belief that there is a designer or some type of an external cause outside of just physical, more of a metaphysical implication, all of that has been deemed as irrational and subjective.

Now, if you have these really smart people stepping forward, these leading scientists and actually bringing up those metaphysical implications suddenly the position of a belief or a tendency towards the metaphysical becomes rational and that for those people, that is the key issue and they see that as extremely dangerous and our position on that and Ben’s position on that and I think most thinking in open people is that is ridiculous.

I mean that is the history of the human race is to be able to combine those two magisteriums and to say yes we have got implications, they are metaphysical implications that come from science. Now, let’s not try to interpret those philosophically within science, let’s interpret those within philosophy lets allow science to have these implications because they are true, they are there and they are in front of these scientists and you need to be able to express them.

Chris Cash: For another thing, from a strictly scientific standpoint if you start limiting what a scientist can even consider as possibility it creates huge problems because if you think about for instance when Einstein came up with the theory of relativity and he started with a supposition that was just so out there, so far from mainstream thought and he just threw it out there and said what if light always travels at the same speed no matter what and built this whole theory around that before even being able to test and see if it was actually true. Now you know with Einstein being who he was it turned out that it was true but you could certainly see the chance that many others who were saying, well lets say what if there was intelligent designer out there just being shot down before they even had a chance to look at what the bigger implications would be in the realm of biology and science.

Walt Ruloff: Yeah, nope you are absolutely right, you are absolutely right.

Chris Cash: Now, putting this movie together I guess we have kind of talked about some of the challenges what were some of the most fun parts of putting this together. I think obviously to me getting Ben into this little schoolboy outfit must have been a challenge but.

Walt Ruloff: That was fun, I mean we had some photo shoots and type of thing with him putting that on, but Ben is really a fun loving guy.

Chris Cash: I see him as having a great sense of humor so.

Walt Ruloff: Yeah, so he put that on and he loved the whole you know trying to create a message around that. He understood it and he loved the process and that was great. I think probably the funest part of making this film it really brought a lot of enjoyment for both Ben and myself and the crew, was really just traveling around the world and going to all these extraordinary places and seeing him in action and all of the activity before hand and finally really truly unique places. A lot of our filming was in front of the Berlin wall which acts as a centre, a central metaphor within the film. As this wall to separate freedom from tyranny within kind of a given area which then was communism and many other places like Brussels. We actually did a whole host of filming at the Vatican which didn’t make it into the film but will be in our extended version and that was absolutely fabulous.

Chris Cash: What kind of stuff did you film at the Vatican, were there actually interviews there or mostly just background.

Walt Ruloff: No, we had a series of interviews which will be in our extended version where we talk to the chief pontificate of science and many others within the Catholic Church and within the Holy See and that it has to be in a separate DVD or an extended version because that really becomes a movie unto itself. So we made a decision that it couldn’t be in the core ones but it will definitely be in the follow up DVD’s and so what is the position of the catholic church how are they going to you know walk this difficult tight rope of accepting the principles of evolution but yet understanding that there is a designer behind it.

What is that kind of core rationalization between those two positions and I think you know from, there is many people in the Catholic Church that are still struggling with that. How do you correlate those two positions, from a purely naturalistic view of science but on the other side also accepting design. So that is a whole new area that we are really interesting in, in moving forward on.

Chris Cash: So this would be kind of like expelled two the extended edition.

Walt Ruloff: Exactly.

Chris Cash: Available sometime when?

Walt Ruloff: 2009.

Chris Cash: Excellent.

Walt Ruloff: Yeah, we are also talking about putting together a four pack DVD, like an educational pack that will deal with this kind of the interpretation of the metaphysic in philosophy and in theology, the positions of the church. We also wanted to do a whole section that really expands the science area, really that was our passion and to expand these new mechanisms that are, very obviously point toward a metaphysical designer that has I should metaphysical implications. How do we deal with that? We want to expand on Ben Stein’s passion which is social Darwinism. We covered a lot of areas in the film and the film moved very quickly so what we want to be able to do is expand each of those areas for people that are interested to get into a lot more detail into the history in these areas, the ongoing debate and what we hope to you know find in the future.

Chris Cash: One thing that I would be interested in knowing more about personally would be the, you’d interviewed several scientists especially the ones who were cloaked in shadow to not reveal their identity who were using the ideas of intelligent design in their research work because they needed that basis to move it forward but they couldn’t acknowledge it. I would be very interested in knowing what kind of research is being fuelled by the ideas behind intelligent design and what problems are being solved with cursory use of the ideas of intelligent design. What kind of problems are being solved that could not have been solved just through Darwin theory alone.

Walt Ruloff: That is an excellent, excellent question and you’ve really hit one of our key passions, in making this film that we want to again follow up with more detail in an extended version. Is, we found literally thousands of scientists who are in key areas. One of your questions was what area they are working in. Well the key areas would be in biotech for example and in research in these new functions within the cell. We are, they are just now really understanding the…

Chris Cash: Which one of the important things to know as an engineer myself that when you are doing technological engineering you don’t care where the theory came from you just want to get something to work.

Walt Ruloff: Exactly, so as an engineer here is a good place to start for yourself, is the area of CAD-CAM computer aided design and computer aided manufacturing, its really dominated the landscape as far as engineering and converting engineering into a manufacturing and an automated manufacturing process such as robotics. Well the area of CAD-CAM really gave us understanding to being able to apply that as a reference position to really exactly what is happening within the cell. On one, and there is many compartments within the cell, for example there is the database of all of the information that will be translated into manufacturing process. So you have the DNA and the RNA synthesis that is being read and then transferred into another area within the cell which actually manufactures proteins and ultimately folds proteins and there is mechanisms that transfer these semi finished parts into an assembly line and then these parts are put together and the very specific parts are put together and one very, very simple, simple part within the trillions of different parts that are existing in all these many different types of cells is the probability of that coming together in the protein manufacturing process that originates from this data is one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion and you remember the fellow by the name of Doctor Doug Axe who is in the film who is studying that process of synthesis and how can the so called the random mutation actually build that protein, well it just cant. So if you put all of that together you can look at an engineer and somebody from computer science and say what is happening within the cell is exactly what is happening on a much, much higher level than what is happening in our modern day manufacturing arenas. I mean to really kind of put in a nutshell what is happening within the cell would be similar to if a Boeing 747 rather than being manufactured in a plant a Boeing 747 could actually replicate itself and actually could fix itself and actually could fly and work itself but the key thing is actually manufacture a new 747 and then that new 747 grows and becomes a full size 747.

I mean the complexity of self manufacturing and holding on to the data and then actually moving from a stem cell to each one of these unique cells and the coordination that happens within our own bodies, the 4.5 trillion cells working together in unison is staggering so going back to your original question. The way that these scientists look at this, is they really have to put aside again unfortunately today in confidence, they have to put aside their current you know they have to put aside Darwinian evolution and look at the cell in this framework as manufacturing as CAD-CAM and then that allows them to use that as a reference point to make sense of what they are looking at. If they look at it, as purely as kind of a random mutation and natural selection it doesn’t get them anywhere, if you understand what I am saying.

So that is why it is so key to where we need to allow these scientists to be free and to open, and to talk about what their seeing because that is, by not allowing them to talk about it you eliminate collaboration. So if somebody is going to write a paper that will ultimately be peer reviewed and be used as a benchmark research. If you are not allowed to talk about it openly you eliminate collaboration and we need to use these reference points such as design and the new processes that are being discovered as this new reference point for proper collaboration across many research entities.

Chris Cash: I feel pretty confident that with continued pushing on this issue we should be able to get to a more open environment hopefully and I guess one can never be sure of any of that but it certainly makes sense and if we can get the word out to a large enough audience then the pressures would create things that make more sense.

Walt Ruloff: Yeah, you are absolutely right and the real injustice that is happening today we haven’t really talked about is where you have this injustice happening but at the same time you have people like Richard Dawkins that are putting forward this extreme atheism by you know using neo-Darwinism as a justification to basically say if you believe in anything other than the material and if you are a believing person you are an idiot. So we’ve got a real problem on our hands. We’ve got a problem in science and now we have a problem in society by people making these ridiculous claims and so yeah.

Chris Cash: Well thank you Wolf, or excuse me thank you Walt.

Walt Ruloff: You are welcome.

Chris Cash: For coming on our show, was there anything you wanted to say to our listeners as a closing.

Walt Ruloff: Well I would really hope that if you could watch our DVD tell your friends about it and go to the website expelledthemovie.com and we are really hoping that we have, we do well with our DVD so that we can use the revenue from this to create many more and to create a lot more follow up with Ben Stein on continuing to move this issue forward so I think that just getting the word out on the DVD is really key and thank you very much for having me on your show.

Chris Cash: Well thank you very much Walt for coming. We appreciate it and we will hopefully hear from you again when some of your new material comes out.

Walt Ruloff: Great, thank you so much Chris.

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Transcript of Interview with Walt Ruloff about Expelled No Intelligence Allowed. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed (DVD) is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-gifts/4003804/Expelled-No-Intelligence-Allowed-DVD/

View the Transcript

Vote for us at Podcast Alley - Please vote for us every month to help us get our show in front of more people

Items Discussed in this podcast:

Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed (DVD)

You are also welcome to call in questions and comments to our voice-mail at 206-426-1207. Be sure to join our Catholic Spotlight Facebook Group where we send out announcements about upcoming interviews. You will be able to call in your questions for our future guests. You might just be on our next show.

Subscribe to our feed | Subscribe with iTunes
Subscribing to our feed lets you know when new shows are available
so you will never miss any of our exciting guests.

A VERY special thanks to Dave Miller for providing the awesome music in this podcast.

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Made for More is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004803/Made-More/

———————————

CHRIS: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the Pod cast where we talk about what’s new, cool and exciting in the Catholic market place. I’m your host Chris Cash, Director of E-Commerce from catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs. And today in the spotlight, we have Curtis Martin, the president and founder of Focus. It’s one of the fastest growing and most dynamic programs in the Catholic Church and also the author of Made for More which is an excellent evangelization tool. Curtis, welcome to the show.

CURTIS MARTIN: Chris, it’s great to be with you and your listeners.

CHRIS: Well, thank you very much. We are very happy to have you. Tell us a little bit more about Focus and what Focus does?

CURTIS MARTIN: Sure, I’d be happy to. Focus is a ten year old program which trains recent college graduates and places them on college campuses to evangelize their peers. Our young people today are drifting away; in fact, they are almost running away from the Catholic faith unfortunately on the college campus. About 8 out of 10, Catholics who go away to college stop practicing their faith and Focus is an attempt not only to change that but to change it in the right direction completely, that young people would actually find Christ in a new way and want to live their Christian faith within the church that Christ founded the Catholic church in a dynamic way for the rest of their lives and so we’re meeting young people, at the pivotal point of their life and inviting them to choose Christ as adults.

CHRIS: Now, how are you accomplishing that?

CURTIS MARTIN: Well a huge part of that Chris is that we’re, it is a relationship. The Christianity is essentially all about relationships. It is first of all God extending us relationships through his son Jesus Christ bringing us back into a relationship that was broken through our own sin. It’s God’s free initiative and then the response of a Christian who has been welcomed in the relationship back in the relationship with Christ, whether it was infant baptism or they had a conversion later in life is to do the same, to go out and extend relationship to others, loving them first because God loves them, offering them the gift of forgiveness. So our young staffs go out, they themselves have had their lives changed by God. We’ve got staff, hundreds of staff around the country on college campuses who have experienced a life changing and transforming relationship with Christ.

They’re going out and they’re hanging out with college students. They’re playing ultimate Frisbee they’re, passing out hot chocolate on cold days, and burgers on warm days, whatever it might be and in the midst of those friendships and relationships, they share what’s most important to them and that most important aspect is their relationship with Jesus Christ and in the midst of that, young people are saying, “well, how can I have that relationship?”, we show them how to do that, how to give their lives to God, how to surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and how to live that Christian faith within the Catholic Church.

CHRIS: Now if somebody is interested in becoming part of this program, do you have resources to provide them with more information? Are there minimum requirements that you have for people who want to become involved?

CURTIS MARTIN: Chris, that’s one of the reasons we’re talking today. Always eager to try to find more young people a typical profile for our staff and let’s be clear, we’re talking about full time stuff who are working with us full time ask for a two year commitment and a typical profile is a recent college graduate, we have people who don’t fit that but the majority do and if there are, young listeners out there today who are saying, “I think that I could give more back to our Lord who has given so much to me, or I think that there’s so much to be done in the world and I’d love to commit some time and energy”. I think, when young people commit to a couple of years of time to Focus, two things are going to happen. First and foremost, they themselves are going to have a life transforming experience.

What, I love is to see if we’ve got young people who are saying, “I’m going to postponed law school and med school and I’m going to invest a couple years of my life because grad school or other and business will help me get rich and help me increase my career path but spending some time with Focus is actually going affect, “who I am, the type of person I am and not just what I do”. The second thing is not only your time with Focus going to have an impact in your life, but you’re going to get involved with one of the most exciting and dynamic mission fields in the world today. Young people today, stand at a crossroads. They are either going to be swept up by a culture that doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t believe in life, doesn’t believe in authentic freedom, it has very little or even no joy, or they’re going to choose Christ and they’re going to find that there’s a life of mercy and grace, a life of meaning and purpose and they’re going to be able to see that they could experience maximum joy in this life and everlasting joy in the life to come.

CHRIS: Now, I guess my interest in this is a little more on the practical side of operations because around the time you are starting this, I was doing road ministry with Reach youth ministry which is kind of a similar idea except traveling around doing retreats for teenagers and often even elementary school kids.

CURTIS MARTIN: Absolutely.

CHRIS: When someone signs up for your program, what are, what does the program provide? Do you have some kind of fund raising requirements to go along with this and where do you get the remainder or the funds that are needed to keep this operation going and how can somebody contribute to your organization financially?

CURTIS MARTIN: Need a better answer. Need a better answer

CHRIS: Well you know, I always had it, right?

CURTIS MARTIN: In this day and age as we go to financial turmoil, I think a lot of people are trying to sit back, what are we going to do, and I think what we’re seeing is, people are saying, you know, I need to do a priority check am I placing my resources, where it matters most, and so it’s exciting, we’re certainly looking for people to partner with us. Let’s go back to the first question which is, how does a young person get involved, what does that look like, again I said you know, typical persons going to come in, is going to be a recent college graduate. We’re going to come in and we’re going to train them and we’re going to take you. The first step is we’re going to take you to what we call new staff training, that’s five weeks of intensive training prayer classes in the faith some of the best teachers Peter Cray, Scott Horn, Tim Grey, Jeff Gavin’s…

CHRIS: Is this a set time every year?

CURTIS MARTIN: Set time in the summer is just after graduation and after that training we’re going to place you on a team with staff who have some more seniority. So we will continue to train you throughout the year. One of the biggest problems in the church today is we don’t feed the feeders; we don’t care for the caregivers, and there’s a tremendous burnout rate in people that had been called in to work. And so our primary role at Focus is to make sure that our missionary staff members are cared for week in and week out, day in and day out and that they are able if they’re well cared for, we know that God is going to do great things in their life. So they are going to be sent out on a team to serve on campus. Part of that training is goes right up which you asked about Chris.

How do these people eat and were going to, there going to contact friends and family member we’re going to give them other tools on how to connect with people and say would you be willing to sponsor my work on campus, by the grace of God we have thousands of donors who are giving $25 to $50 dollars a month and saying, “Hey, I’ll sponsor Britney or Sam and they’re sending their money to Focus, they get a tax write off for their gift and that money passes through us and goes out to support the apostolic ministry of our staff on the field and there it covers not only what they do but also what they eat and where they live and so we’re very excited about, that its been a very effective program but we’re always in need of more friends. The field is literally ripe for harvest. We are serving on 40 campuses right now with hundreds of staff serving thousands of students but there are more than 40 college campuses in America, in fact, there’s more than two thousand college campuses in America and we are just starting, we believe that if we were to send staff to a hundred campuses, two hundred campuses, we would see a transformation in young lives and God willing a transformation in our culture.

CHRIS: How many staff do you typically have on an individual campus?

CURTIS MARTIN: A basic team would be four staff, two men and two women. As we said, we send our first year staff out with veteran staffs so a typical team would be a veteran man and veteran woman and then a first year staff and a first year woman and they would be out on campus and there’s, there going to be investing in college students. The young people today are looking for friends who will help them. We live in a culture where there we have friends but our friends don’t necessarily know what’s best for us, that’s the beauty of Christianity, it takes goodness and generosity and harnesses it with truth and meaning and purpose in life and all of a sudden you have a friend saying, “hey, how can I help you become who you were supposed to be when God willed you into existence.

He had a dream for you, He had a plan for you and the world in sin and confusion creep in and take us of course that we miss that plan and when we loose sight of the reason we were created, we will loose our meaning and purpose in life and we become frustrated, we become anxious, we loose our hope. When we are reintroduced to Jesus Christ and then He introduces that plan for our lives, our life all of a sudden is filled again with meaning and purpose. We find ourselves waking up in the morning eager to get on with our life to invest our lives in others and all of the sudden; the joy we were made for comes alive in us again. So that’s the role that’s going on college campus. We’re seeing now literarily as I said Chris thousands of young college students who are making radical decisions to follow Christ in a Godless society. In our society in whole has turned its back on its back on God, in a lot of ways. The society on college campus, sometimes even some Catholic college campuses have turned their back on God on lived experiential way in which many young college student experience it.

CHRIS: Now, do you get a lot of partnership with the campus Newman centers and other campus ministries?

CURTIS MARTIN: Yeah, we go and work with the existing campus ministry programs. A lot of times that’s a great and vibrant, vital relationship. Let’s face it, sometimes that’s a challenging relationship, not all Newman centers have been sources of radical faithfulness to Christ and his church and we have to move incrementally to try to build faithfulness in some of those situations but what our commitment is to renew the church from within the church. , You know, there were two movements that took place in fifteen hundreds, one was called the Protestant Reformation the other one was called the Catholic Counter reformation. Both of them served to reform the church but one left the church. We believe that that’s the broken model. While, there might be many sincere people that are trying to do that. Christ said that He found the one church and He was going to be with it until the end, so we believe that real authentic renewal is going to take place by renewing the Catholic Church, the church that Christ founded.

CHRIS: Well, that is an awesome program. I really wish you the best and everyone out there listening do check it out where they can find the information on that again?

CURTIS MARTIN: www.focusonline.org, and the easy is www.focusonline.org or just Google Focus Catholic and we will come right up and love to have you engage us. Well maybe to make a comment Chris about what you were mentioning about the traveling program that you were involved in, that’s another very important way to serve. We have to do both in. We need to go out and just spread the message far and wide but we also need to go deep whenever possible and so there’s a great compliment there. I kind a view that those that travel around as kind of fire starters and those who stay around and go deep are the ones who take care of the fire once its burning. It’s so important for us to do everything we can.

Some of us are going to be called in one direction or another, there’s the you know, there are better and less good ways to go, the key thing is, what does, Christ want you to do. For each of us to sit quietly and not a lot of times our prayer life is, “Hey God, this is what I like you to do for me, I like this, this and this and this and this, and this and this and thanks by the way I’ll see you later”, and we need to also recognize, yes, God wants to care for our needs but do we take just a few moments a day and say, “God, what do you want from me? What do you want for me? Speak into my life Lord. I know you made me for a purpose, help me to know what that purpose is”, when we do that God is going to really become active in our lives so we begin to hear His voice.

CHRIS: And you know that was always one of the drawbacks that we saw in the traveling ministry program was that we’d be in a location for a couple of days, maybe a week and we’d see all these fires get started and we knew what kind of a struggle it was going to be once we left for those people to keep that fire going. So programs like Focus are really awesome in that that they can help to keep that fire going for the long term because you’ve always got a Focus person there and available.

CURTIS MARTIN: That is, so important we have to recognize that you know, again I would say both are necessary, absolutely. The power of these traveling programs is they’re going to bring something new and get people to rethink about their lives.

CHRIS: Well, and it’s easy with a traveling program to really bring in an exciting program that’s going to really put some wow into life that is different from what somebody who is there on the campus, continuously is going to be able to put forth as well.

CURTIS MARTIN: We have got to do that because, let’s face it the central prayer for Catholics is the mass and yet most young Catholics experiences boredom when they go to mass and the problem is not with the mass, the problem is we have not brought people to a dynamic vibrant relationship with Christ. I know that in my own life, yeah I was raised Catholic, I drifted away and I gave my life to Christ in my sophomore year in college but the first Christians I met were evangelical Protestants and they helped me in many ways but one of the negative effects was they led me away from the Catholic church and from the sacraments and I was away for several years but I was studying and I was praying and I was thinking and when I finally for the first time in many years went back to mass, I was awe struck by the amount of scripture, by the amount of prayer, by the richness of the symbolism.

All of which had come to me through my prayer and reading of scripture and so we have to recognize that we’ve got to help young people engage the mass where it is. Mass is where heaven and earth meet but if you don’t know what going on, it may seem irrelevant and that’s the power of these fire starter ministries that travel around and engage people at a new level and so I want to encourage people that, that ministries and others do fantastic work and other groups and at the same time I do agree, once those sparks are ignited we got to do all we can to help people burn with love for Christ for a lifetime, because Christianity is a Marathon.

CHRIS: All right, well we’re going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor. When we come back, we will start talking about Made for more, this awesome new evangelization resource book. This is the Catholic Spotlight.

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CHRIS: And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight with Curtis Martin talking about Made for more, an awesome evangelization resource. Now, this book is it geared mostly at teenagers or does it really have a wider audience in that?

CURTIS MARTIN: You know Chris; the beautiful thing about working with college students is that you really have to speak to them as adults because that’s what they are. They are the young adults but you’ve got to speak to them as adults. They are now ready to be serious about the way they think, so when you engage college students which in some ways is our primary audience with the book, you’re really speaking to a very broad group because it needs to be a dynamic presentation or they’ll just put it down. So it actually will address and speak to high school students as well. What I would argue is that there’s really no age group that this wouldn’t work sort of after adolescent so I think you got you’re certainly talking about somebody who’s hit adolescence but we want it to be a youthful presentation. We are looking at here in the United states, we’ve got 60 million Catholics; most of them are attending mass most Sundays and many of the holy days of obligations if I know they’re there but they don’t necessarily wake up in the morning and think about, what does it mean to be Catholic,

What does it mean to have Jesus Christ the center of my life? And the Catholic Church works and they’re going to they’ll work their way through life, they’ll marry. They’ll stay faithful, they’ll continue to go to the sacraments but the goal here is not to simply stay Catholic or it’s not even simply to get to heaven. It’s to go to heaven and bring as many people with you as you can and so what we’re trying to do with the book is wake people up. We also recognize that in almost every family, there are family members who have left the church and I’ve heard now for 15 years, moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas saying, “What do I give my son or daughter? What book, what tape, what CD, what can I give my son or daughter to consider, reconsider the Catholic faith? And the goal of Made for More is to be a short presentation, it’s not a very thick book to engage people where they are and to bring them into a new look of the Catholic faith.

The church has the answers for their questions but we as lifelong Catholics need to re-look. Sometimes we think, we know Catholicism but you know what our view of Catholicism is sometimes a second grade version and we need an adult version and for those who’ve never been Catholic to understand what the Catholic Church is, and what it teaches, that’s the purpose of Made for More is a tool to be able to handsomely say here’s a short read that would let you know why Jesus Christ, why the Catholic Church.

CHRIS: One of the things I really like about the way the book is set up, you’ve got lots of kind of mini power point presentations here in the book that goes through the logical arguments for Christianity, I mean this is not simply an argument for Catholicism it’s also an argument for the validity of the scriptures, for the validity of the resurrection and you’ve got lots of, I mean they’re not sophisticated graphics but they are nice graphics, they go through the logical arguments so that people can grasp it in a very visual way.

CURTIS MARTIN: And we’d got to do that cause we live world where some funny things have happened, we’re relativism is the philosophy that holds the day which is basically says, what are talking about the way you behave or what you believe, whatever works for you is fine, whatever works for me, there’s no real truth that conforms this and sometimes we as Catholics even fall in this trap and say well we as Catholics believe in Jesus as God, well it’s true but it actually not a very healthy way to speak of that. Mathematicians never say that, “we as mathematicians believe that 2+2 is 4, no 2+2 is 4, mathematicians get that right and we need to be able to see that Christianity, Catholicism is based on truth. Jesus is God.

He did live, He did die and He did rise from the dead, we as Catholics happen to believe that, we’re right about that and if we leave Christianity at the level of preference, then how do you really stake your life on it, I mean I like mint chip ice cream but if you prefer chocolate, we’re not going to argue about that. There’s really no point in it, you can like chocolate, I can like mint chip, but if you, but if we’re talking about whether or not Jesus Christ is God, that’s worthy of a vigorous discussion because if he really did rise from the dead, if you really did say, “hey Chris, hey Curtis, I’m the way, the truth and the life”, then people should know that, that’s a radical claim and He backed it up from rising from the dead.

Jesus Christ is the most unique person in all of human history without question, without competition and we need to get peoples eyes on Him because it’s in Christ that the Catholic church makes sense and so what we want to do is make sure that people realize that is completely rational to be a Christian, in fact it’s irrational not to be and so that’s the huge part of the discussion. Can you trust the scriptures? Is the claim of the resurrection a reliable claim? And then the second part is what do you do with that? How that does affect your life? Because Jesus didn’t just do something in history, He did something for each one of us in history to have an impact in our personal lives.

CHRIS: Now, what kind of response are you getting from people who are using the book as far as its effectiveness?

CURTIS MARTIN: Yeah, that’s been a tremendous exciting reality, we you know, to get the book out is a challenge, and a Catholic book when I was involved with Catholic for a Reason still am involved obviously, we got that book out 10 years ago. In Catholic Church you know, to get 25000 books out is a tremendous thing, an achievement and Catholic for Reason was able to achieve that over a period of time. Made for more has more that 30000 copies out on the first three months and we’re getting…

CHRIS: And it helps that you’re using this as a giveaway book.

CURTIS MARTIN: Well absolutely because the tool is we’ve got to recognize in evangelization is kind a like sales. You can’t sell somebody something they don’t know there want. The very nature evangelization is we were all made by God and we’re all made for God but if you haven’t been evangelized, you don’t know that, so that you can’t sell that to somebody. You need to find somebody who already is alive in Christ who could hand that to somebody else. So they’re giveaways in some senses but somebody is paying for them. We’ve got donors who have said look I’ll sponsor the gift of a thousand books to this campus or we could make the offer today, that if you’d like to pick up a book, it’s available online, you can email us at made for more, or have info even better, info@focusonline.org, if you want a book its $10 but if you want 3 books, $25, if you want 10 books then we’ll drop that down to $75. We’ll drop the cost down, to 25% off. We want to make it easy for people to have a book in their bag whether you’re on an airplane or you’re in as meeting with a friend and somebody says hey I’m just going through a tough time in my life to be able to say, “here is something that doesn’t cause me much to give you but it could have a huge impact in your life, that’s a more effective tool than to say, Gosh, I hope people are all of a sudden going to start running to catholic bookstores and buying books about the faith when they don’t know that that’s what they want. We got to realize that…

CHRIS: We at the Catholic Company are certainly hoping that they are going to run to the Catholic bookstore and pick up a bunch of books on their faith.

CURTIS MARTIN: And they need. That’s exactly what they’ve got to do but we got to recognize that to get to the next level, we need just as you went around and traveled around the country and spoke the word of Christ. We need people to read that because once they come alive in their faith, they’re going to need Catholic bookstores to fuel that fire. I was with somebody recently, a friend of mine, who said I don’t know a Catholic who’s having an impact on people’s lives who are not reading good Catholic books. We’ve got to recognize that. The question is what’s that first entry level tool to draw more people in?

CHRIS: Absolutely and on the note of Catholic bookstores, please, please do and pray for and patronize all your local Catholic bookstores as well because every one of them is doing this as a ministry I don’t know anybody in the Catholic book industry who is getting rich by any means doing what they’re doing. It’s an outreach for every single one of us out there trying to evangelize with every bit of love and effort that we’ve got so….

CURTIS MARTIN: And I really want to highlight that Chris, recognize that I know Catholic books changed my life. I was a community Evangelical Christian; and came across some good Catholic books which opened the door back into the Catholic faith. If there weren’t people doing the ministry of running Catholic bookstores, I wouldn’t have gotten those books. I would not have maybe God would have chosen another path but the path he chose was to lead me through good Catholic books and over and over again as I speak to people who are either are converts to Catholicism or who were asleep in their faith as Catholics and woke up. I very seldom have ever met anybody where Catholic books didn’t play that role and as you said if Catholic bookstores are not open and active and making those books available, then people are just going to go without and so it’s very important to support that. You know, Christmas time is coming, great gifts can you find some great catholic books.

CHRIS: Keep Christ in Christmas, keep Christ in Christmas. Remember your faith roots, when you’re thinking about what you should be giving as gifts at Christmas and very much support the local Catholic bookstores if they’re there because we’re hearing stories all the time especially with the economy, and the way it is right now, of Catholic bookstores at least the local ones going out of business because they can no longer, that they already weren’t making very much and when it goes to negative income, it becomes very difficult especially if you are a practicing faithful Catholic with a large family, trying to support them.

CURTIS MARTIN: Well, it’s a huge challenge, and I love to tell even my evangelical friends, we agree that we should put Christ in Christmas, keep Christ in Christmas but as Catholic Christians, we believe that you need to put the Christ and the mass into Christmas. It is Christ mass, that we, it is a Catholic reality to celebrate Christmas and to recognize that it’s really our job as Catholics to recognize it. This time as we are turning our attention as a culture towards Christmas, this has become very secularized to realize that it’s important to put Christ and mass in to Christmas.

CHRIS: Absolutely. So back to the book what are some of the specific things that you’re seeing in terms of fruits coming out of the book so far?

CURTIS MARTIN: We’re hearing grace stories of people who have gained a renewed confidence because we need to recognize that at this point in time there’s a battle going on whether we choose to get involved or not the battle is already involved. Those who are opposed to the church are fighting 24/7. They’re working very effectively. There has been a rise now in what called the New atheism books, best selling books are now out questioning what’s so great about God, the God delusion, these books are finding their way in to the popular culture and they are destroying the faith of modern Catholics, those Catholics who are, you know, that they go to church but they don’t, they’re don’t necessarily spend a great deal of time reading Catholic material. They don’t spend a great deal of time talking to God in their personal lives. And all of a sudden the basic trust of confidence in the person or Jesus Christ has been undermined. And that, and then they stop going to church.

They’ll read the book or have a conversation with somebody and that Sunday they don’t go to church and they’re gone. And we’ve got to recognize trying to track them down once they’re gone is a very, very challenging process. We’ve got to do all we can to win them before they leave. And that’s one of the steps we’ve seen is that a lot of Catholics are saying you know I’m so grateful because I know I believe these things but now I realize I have a great confidence of what I believe. The other thing is that we are seeing people who have been away, who had been away for years, who are waking up whether they were catholic or had drifted or whether they were non Catholics who are saying “I never really realized how relevant Christianity was to my life. And for those of us who are committed Christians we recognize of course that’s the case but there’s a fundamental principle to paraphrase to St Augustine, we were made by God and we were made for God. That being said there’s nothing else in life that’s more important.

I mean if you think about it this way Chris. If we were to have a life were we had all the friends and all the honor and all the accolades and all the money and all the possessions that we could possibly imagine, success in every way that the world defines but we did not have God and we died and we’re separated from him forever we would be an absolute failure a million years now, an absolute failure. Whereas if we went through life and didn’t have all the money and all the friends and the all the glory and all the accolades and all the earthly success but we died in the real, in relationship with God and we went to heaven with him, our lives would be a great success. So while all these other things are goods, they’re only goods if we Christ in our life first. In fact Jesus said that seek first His kingdom and righteousness and all this things will be added unto you. At the same time he said what does it profit a man to gain the entire world and lose his sole and we’ve got to recognize that this is the most fundamental decision every man woman and child on the face of the earth will ever make. Jesus Christ stands before them today the risen Christ stands before today saying who do you say that I am? The answer to that question in our own personal lives is the most important question and answer we’re going to have in our entire lives.

CHIRS CASH: And also one other thing I wanted to mention with respect to books like this and getting them into people’s hands certainly we want to have copies of these typed materials available to handout to people who we meet and who are open to hearing what we have to say. But it does not profit us a lot to just buy a thousand of them and hand them out on the street to people walking along. You gotta have that relationship with the person in some way in order to earn the right to be heard from them. My best example is you know your walking through the mall somebody’s handing out flyers for this or that, they put a flyer on my hand the first trash can that I see it’s gone. You know, so we want to use these materials in an effective way and part of that is that we really have to be developing relationships with these people that we want to evangelize so that we earned the right to be heard from them.

CURTIS MARTIN: I would want to pile on completely. In beginning with what you said I mean to go out and pass out books or pamphlets to people you don’t know is a very low impact. Let’s say you pass out a hundred books, 50 of them might be thrown away.

CHIRS CASH: *** (0:32:34).

RESPONDEDNT: 47 of them, yeah, let’s say 80 or 90 are thrown away. 10 are taken home and 5 are read and two people’s lives are changed. Well two people’s lives changed are still powerful. We know that even passing out without relationship must work because people continue to do it. But what if we could do it better, why would we not. And that’s exactly where I would go. Yes there’s some impact you can have even by passing things out to people you don’t know. But you could magnify that affect, five fold, ten fold, a 100 fold by entering into relationship with people, taking the time to talk to them. Look how Jesus reached us. God reached us not by dropping the bible out of heaven and say read this. No, He came and lived with us for 33 years, in a certain way but thought us for three years and then died for us and launched the church from his wounded side to reach the world through the same mechanism, through relationship and so I absolutely want to agree. Conversations are the key. I was in a conversation yesterday with a gentleman. We were on an airplane and you know you can do a five to ten minute conversation. He say well so you’re a Catholic why are you catholic? Well in that 10 minute relationship would it be better if I have a 3 months or a 6 months relationship? Yes, but I was in an airplane. And so I handed him a copy of the book and said look read the book, here’s my contact information. If you got any questions…

CHIRS CASH: Well ten minute relationship is…

CURTIS MARTIN: It could even be greater in fact.

CHIRS CASH: is a relationship though, I mean you have given yourself…

CURTIS MARTIN: Absolutely, it could even be greater impact if I got a friend who I’ve been a friend with three or four years. And I sent the book. Obviously the more we could do the better, but let’s agree lets do all that we can do and I think that’s what we want to do is encourage all Catholics. A lot of Catholics want to do what they can. They’re not quite sure what to say and I say that the invitational model of evangelization is something anybody can do. Is there a Catholic speaker coming to town? Or is there some catholic material, a CD or a book that you’ve been able to get a hold of and in your friendship can you say look I’d like to invite you to listen to this to read this or to come to this talk, those are invitations any catholic can make and then its always better if you could follow up in fact I’d like to take you to the talk or I’ve listen to the CD, its great, let’s, why don’t you listen to it, lets talk about it, I’ve read this book why don’t you read it and lets talk about it. Those are powerful tools of engagement.

CHIRS CASH: Well, thank you Curtis, is there anything else you want to share with our listeners before we end the show today?

CURTIS MARTIN: Yeah, Chris I just want to invite you if you’d like to get a copy of Made for More. I love to share that with you. If you want to get a hold of Focus and see if there’s a campus near by, maybe you got sons of daughters or grandsons or granddaughters get away, getting ready to go to college or maybe you’re young person today saying, “I think God is asking something more of me, I’d love for you to contact Focus at www.focusonline.org. Take a taste of who we are and be in touch with us to see if maybe God calling you to serve in a radical and exciting way.

CHRIS: Well, thank you Curtis. We appreciate you being here and for all of you out there listening, it is coming up, yes it is probably the start of the month again with this episodes so head over to Podcast alley and vote for us. Make sure that you do that so that we can get in front of more people and get the show out to the wider audience. Also lead us a review over on iTunes, it helps every bit and come join us over on Facebook as well. We have a Facebook group where you can find out more upcoming interviews and maybe you can have a chance to post some questions to our authors. So Curtis, thank you very much and God bless.

CURTIS MARTIN: Thank you so much for all you are doing and the Catholic Company is doing a great work so grateful to be with you all day.

CHRIS: Alright, God bless.

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Transcript of Interview with Curtis Martin about Saints at the Dinner Table. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Made for More is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004803/Made-More/

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Items Discussed in this podcast:

Made for More

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Saints at the Dinner Table is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004161/Saints-at-Dinner-Table/

———————————

Chris Cash: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the podcast where we talk about what’s new, cool, and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I’m your host, Chris Cash, director of e-Commerce from catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs.

Chris Cash: And today in the spotlight, we have Amy Heyd, author of Saints at the Dinner Table. Welcome, Amy!

Amy Heyd: Thank you very much.

Chris Cash: So Amy, what was that?

Amy Heyd: For inviting me, thanks for inviting me.

Chris Cash: Oh! Well, you’re very, very welcome. I’m glad to have you on the show. I think your book is one of the more interesting things to come across my desk lately and I’m very happy to have a chance to talk with you about it, it certainly a topic that’s a little bit different from the other things that we see on the Catholic marketplace right now. Talking about saints and food, two of my favorite topics. So Amy, what’s your background? What got you involved in first off, in the food industry?

Amy Heyd: In the food industry, I have entered lots of baking contests so I’m not a professional chef but I am a stay-at-home mom that’s making dinner, you know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner everyday of the week and then over and above that, I love to create recipes and I was a finalist in the Pillsbury Bakeoff and also, you know, one within several other contests and for baking and cooking.

Chris Cash: Now do you have other cooking books out there right now or is this it?

Amy Heyd: This is my only book, yes.

Chris Cash: And what…?

Amy Heyd: Or my first book, I should say.

Chris Cash: That’s the perfect way to put it, absolutely. And with the response you’re getting, I assume that there’s probably other ideas ruminating in there.

Amy Heyd: There are other ideas, yes.

Chris Cash: So what gave you the idea of tying your original recipe creation techniques and skills in with the saints?

Amy Heyd: What had actually happened, the short answer to that is that a good friend of mine is an editor at St. Anthony Messenger Press and my mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and you know, it was a long period of time and over that, I would talk with my friends and tell them what we were going through and my friend at St. Anthony and Mary knew my spiritual side and kind of went through that process with me and she also knew that I loved to cook and she always enjoyed my food and she came to me and she said, “I think you need to write a book about saints and cooking.” Because I had told her some experiences I had with some saints and then when she said that it had never occurred to me to do that but I thought I would love to do that. And so then, I started to take some of the saints that I really loved and try to write a biography for people that they could really get to know the saints and then created recipes that you could make to prepare a meal that really connects with that saint in some way and celebrate that saint.

Chris Cash: Now, all the recipes in your book are original, correct?

Amy Heyd: They are, they’re all original, yes.

Chris Cash: Now, where do you get your inspiration for the types of food and recipes that you create? Are these things that you’ve had for a while or did you actually sit down and create every single one of these specifically for this book?

Amy Heyd: It varies. Some of the recipes were recipes that I had been making for my family for years and then just felt like, “Oh this would go really well with this saint.” This represents what that saint means to me but some of the recipes truly were an inspiration from the saints themselves. St. Hildegard, for example, was a nun in the 1100s and she was an amazing woman who accomplished many things but one of the things was she was an herbalist and wrote books about that and she had beliefs about certain foods. And certain foods, she said, brought joy like almonds and fennel and it’s interesting because a lot of those foods that she talks about that bring joy are either a super food, what we would list as a super food today, or just on the list of healthy foods that any dietician or nutritionist would tell you to eat. But anyway, I was inspired by some of those food items so for her, one of the items is a St. Hildegard salad that has some Granny Smith apples and some fennel and spring greens and toasted almonds and goat cheese and a citrus vinaigrette and it’s a healthful meal that brings joy. So she really inspired me for that recipe and some of the other saints for some of the other recipes as well.

Chris Cash: Now, who do you test your recipes out on?

Amy Heyd: It starts with my family. So they got to try the first round on all the recipes and some they loved right off the bat and there were others that…and I knew, like sort of St. Hildegard, that recipe I was able to get right on the first try. I started a little bit more with some of the recipes for St. Elizabeth of Hungary. I remember I did prepare like this Hungarian lasagna-type deal that really didn’t turn out well. And then, I ended up for her, she’s the patron saint of baking because she always gave the bread to the poor and a lot of times, she’s pictured with a loaf of bread so for her, there’s a bierock which is a meat-filled bread and it’s more of a German or Hungarian dish and it also represents the bread making plus this substantial meat filling represents all the substantial giving that she did for people.

Chris Cash: So, now all of the saints that you used, did they have some kind of connection to food already or are you attributing some of the connections just from their heritage and what they would have been eating themselves?

Amy Heyd: Because I love to cook, I really looked at saints who had a connection with food. That’s what I started with. St. Joseph is a saint that I’ve always loved and so, he’s the saint that first I already knew about had a wonderful connection with food so I included him in the book just because I loved St. Joseph but when I had first started looking into things, I thought, well let me try to explore some saints that have some connection with food. And there are some saints that have a connection with food that I really didn’t find a connection with like St. Christine the Astonishing. She, oh gosh, I think she was the third or fourth century, but she had had a grand mal seizure of some sort and they thought she was dead. So they had hurried up and they were having a funeral mass and during the middle of the mass, she opened the coffin and flew up to the ceiling and everybody in the church ran out except for the priest and her sister who called her down and she spent the rest of her life hiding in ovens and places some people because I guess she couldn’t stand the smell of their breath and all those things, the smells that people had. So I didn’t really find a connection with her. I did not include her in the book but even though she had hid in ovens and stayed in kitchens but I did include saints like St. Josephine Bakhita who worked, ended up later in her life working in the kitchen and serving the nuns, the Canossian sisters in Italy and so I included her in the book. And then St. Elizabeth because she’s the patron saint of baking. I included her in the book. But it had to be a saint that had some connection. It started out with the connection with food but it really, the saints that I included in the book were saints that had I thought interesting lessons to share. Because for me, one of the things that I wanted to do was to sit at the dinner table with my family over a meal and be able to talk with each other about tell the life of a saint and to be able to share my faith with my children and then also talk about the lessons that that saint has. So I told you I write a biography about the saint. Well after their biography, I have a reflection about the saint that just kind of talks about the lessons that that saint has to share and brings it up to date and shows why that lesson even though the saint was living in the first century, why that lesson is still important today.

Chris Cash: But you’d consider St. Lawrence, he’s always been a big food person to me just because he’s known for being fried…

Amy Heyd: He’s the patron saint of broiled food.

Chris Cash: Yeah, exactly, he was fried to death and at some point; he’s reported to have said to his executioner, “Flip me over. I’m done on this side.” So…

Amy Heyd: I looked him up. But that’s the only story I could find about him. That’s the only story that there was to share and so I didn’t include him in the book.

Chris Cash: I understand, well, we’re going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor but we’ll be back in a few minutes to hear more from Amy Heyd about Saints at the Dinner Table. This is the Catholic Spotlight.

Chris Cash: And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight with Amy Heyd talking about Saints at the Dinner Table. You have approximately 12, is it 12 saints in the book?

Amy Heyd: Twelve saints, yes.

Chris Cash: Were there others that you were considering putting in and didn’t quite make it? Or how did you determine which 12 you really wanted to go with?

Amy Heyd: I tried to select saints that had different lessons to share so there’s many other saints out there that I really love but I wanted to show different lessons. You know, there’s that book that last lecture ounce, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it but my husband often says, “This is like your last lecture/” Where to my kids, where it just…if my kids were to…if I were to die today and this is all I had left to give to my kids then it would show in there, these are the things that I think are really important in my life so each saint has a different lesson that I feel it’s important for us to know; lesson of forgiveness or lesson of giving to the poor, the lesson of caring for others, the lesson of seeing Jesus in others. So that is kind of how I got to these 12 different things that I chose.

Chris Cash: And did you also try to come up with saints that would have varied recipes that would go with them, I would assume?

Amy Heyd: As I did the recipes, I took that into consideration but that kind of just fell into place. Because the recipes are varied. They’re all easy to make but that kind of fell into place so that I wasn’t consistently…it wasn’t like it was spaghetti, spaghetti, spaghetti.

Chris Cash: And I’m not going to be having to go out and go to a specialty food store to find the ingredients for these?

Amy Heyd: No, you can get everything at your grocery store.

Chris Cash: Which of the saints had the recipe that you’ve gotten the best feedback on, so far?

Amy Heyd: Everybody loves the meatball tortellini soup from St. Margaret’s chapter and I think it’s just…we had a…one of the bookstores here prepared a meal and they prepared a meal from the book but they prepared a couple of different things and they prepared the Chicken Saltimbocca from St. Claire’s chapter and some Meatball Tortellini soup from the chapter on St. Margaret and Mary’s Laid Back Greens from the chapter on St. Martha and an almond torte from the chapter on St. Claire and actually, everybody loved all those things but they all went home and prepared the Meatball Tortellini soup and eventually about six or seven people said they prepared the Chicken Saltimbocca again. That’s a nice one, you can double the recipe easily and it’s easy to make if you’re having a big dinner party.

Chris Cash: And do you have a personal favorite for yourself?

Amy Heyd: You know, it depends on what mood I’m in but for St. Didacus, he was a vegetarian and so for Lent, on Fridays and Lent, I really love making his meal which kind of a fiery Spanish eggplant and that’s fried and then with it is a fettuccine with some roasted tomato salsa and it’s again easy to make and it’s really flavorful. I kind of feel like I’m cheating for Lent when I eat it.

Chris Cash: And have you heard of any reports of Catholic dinner clubs getting together and maybe instead of doing a bible study, doing a saint’s dinner study with your book?

Amy Heyd: The book just came out, oh gosh, the end of August and so it’s new but we had, just the other day, and that was the Catholic Women’s Group here in Cincinnati and that’s what we did. We talked about…they ate the meal for St. Isidore the Farmer then I talked about his wife and then they’ve gotten to small groups discussed the questions. I have questions in the book, some discussion questions that you can start with. You can ask your own questions but I have some starter questions for you. So they did that and it was a really enjoyable night.

Chris Cash: And are you getting any other feedback from people as they try things out?

Amy Heyd: What’s been nice for me is…it’s been nice to hear all the people who have come up to me and told me that they really enjoy the stories. I had tried out the food. As I’ve told you, I tried it out on my family and I’ve got a couple of really picky eaters and when I got the thumbs up from them, I said, “Okay, I think this is good.” And then I made the food for a lot of other people and so enough people have tried the food that I felt pretty comfortable with that but I’m not a writer by trade and it was real important for me to write this. It was difficult for me but I really wanted to write stories that really showed the saints, how they lived their lives, and who they were so you got a good feeling for them. So you kind of know who you’re praying to. I always feel like St. Mary is an easy person to pray to because you know her story, you know who she is. You have that connection with her and I want to present these saints in a way that you could feel that way about some other things. And it’s been nice because I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people saying how much they appreciate the stories too.

Chris Cash: So do you actually have another project at the works at this point or are you waiting to see what the overall response is?

Amy Heyd: Well, right now, I’m actually just working on a website for the book and what I’d like to do is have at least one a month but have some recipes for some saints. So I’m working on some recipes for some saints to put on that website as well. So that’s what I’m working on right now.

Chris Cash: And what is your website?

Amy Heyd: The website will be amyheyd.com. It’s A-M-Y-H-E-Y-D dot com but it’s not up yet.

Chris Cash: Approximate date when you think it might be available for those with…

Amy Heyd: I bet it’s going to be another month before it’ll be available so probably sometime before Christmas.

Chris Cash: Okay, so this show is posting in late October so if you’re listening anytime in December of ’08 or beyond, you can probably find that website hopefully out there and you find some excellent resources, I would imagine. We’re running out of time here, Amy. Was there anything else you want to share with our listeners before we finish up?

Amy Heyd: Oh gosh, no but I hope as they get the book, they enjoy it and if on the website we are going to put a way that you can contact me and send me messages and I’d love to hear the feedback or if there’s different saints that you really like, kind of you know of that has a connection with food or just has a really good lesson to share, I would love to hear that as well.

Chris Cash: And if you get enough postings, are you going to take all that feedback and put it into book 2?

Amy Heyd: Yeah, that may be what happens.

Chris Cash: Good way to go about it, I think, that’s right.

Amy Heyd: Well, and it really was a wonderful spiritual journey for me to put the book together to really delve into the lives of the saints and meditate and really think about those saints did and what I should be doing. So it’s a good experience writing it as well.

Chris Cash: Well thank you, Amy. It has been a real pleasure to have you on the show and all you out there who are looking for something a little different especially with Christmas coming up here, this is an excellent gift book even for your maybe not quite so Catholic friends where you can have something that would be a real connecting point to people beyond just Catholic doctrine. Everybody loves to eat, just about at least. So this is a great gift for those out there who want to share their faith but not in such a hardcore way that might turn other people off, right Amy?

Amy Heyd: Exactly. That’s why I love it. I have a number of friends who aren’t Catholic who bought the book and have come up to me and said they bought it for the recipes because they’ve had my food but they too said, “I really like the stories.” And I said, “Good. I’m glad you’re reading that.” So, yeah, I would agree with what you just said.

Chris Cash: Well, thank you, Amy. Saints at the Dinner Table, Amy Heyd. You won’t regret picking up a copy of that and for all of you listeners out there who are tuning in for the first time, please go over to catholicspotlight.com, subscribe to our feeds so you’ll be updated with future shows as they come out. Also remember, it’s going to be the beginning of the month here soon and please go on over to Podcast Alley and vote for us as well as leave us reviews on iTunes. It helps to get the word out about the show and bring more people in so that we can have a bigger audience and better shows in the future. Thank you very much, Amy! It was a real pleasure to talk to you and I’m looking forward to trying some of your recipes myself!

Amy Heyd: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for inviting me.

Chris Cash: Okay, God bless.

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Transcript of Interview with Amy Heyd about Saints at the Dinner Table. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

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Holy Sex is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004771/Holy-Sex–Catholic-Guide-to-Toe-Curling-Mind-Blowing-Infallible-Loving/

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Chris Cash:  This is the Catholic Spotlight, the podcast where we talk about what’s new, cool, and exciting in the Catholic marketplace.  I’m your host, Chris Cash, director of eCommerce from catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs.

Chris Cash:  And today in the Spotlight, we have Dr. Greg Popcak, author of Holy Sex!  A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving.  You know, I saw the name of that book come across my desk and I said, “This is going to be a fun book to talk about.  What do you think, Dr. Popcak?”

Greg Popcak:  Well, I certainly hope so.

Chris:  And welcome!

Greg Popcak:  It’s great to be here with you, Chris.  Thanks so much for having me on board.

Chris:  Now you are an extremely busy guy.  I’m very thankful that you were able to make it on the show.  I know you’ve got your own medical practice as well as a couple of radio shows.  So you’re no…

Greg Popcak:  We do a telephone counseling practice with Catholics all over the world and they contact us for the Pastoral Solutions Institute.  We do marriage and family and personal counseling all over the telephone.  And it’s been a great resource for folks who can’t find faithful counseling in their area.  We’re very blessed to be able to provide that service for folks.

Chris:  It sounds like an excellent service for sure.  And then of course, you’ve got your radio shows, are they on Sirius?

Greg Popcak:  Well, we are daily noon to one Eastern on the Ave Maria radio network so we’re in about 25 Catholic stations around the country and through that, and then every evening, every weekday evening from 10 to midnight, we’re on the Sirius Satellite Radio Channel 159, the Catholic channel with our program Fully Alive.

Chris:  And that also goes along with out good friend Greg and Jennifer who are on from 10 to 1 on Sirius 159.  So, we are very glad you found time in your day to come talk to us.  So let’s get started with Holy Sex.  Can you tell a little…oh, and I need to make sure to mention that exceptionalmarriages.com is where you can find Greg’s website, if you want to learn more about his ministries as well.

Greg Popcak:  Great, thank you.

Chris:  And we will have that in the show notes, if anybody’s looking.  So tell us about Holy Sex!  What was it that got you interested in writing this book in particular?

Greg Popcak:  Well I mean, as I said I work with an almost exclusively Catholic population in the counseling practice, the telephone counseling practice now and we field a lot of questions on this topic obviously because it’s really in the top three reasons why couples will initiate marital counseling and it’s the number one reason that men initiate marital counseling whenever they’re the ones who make the call.  So that’s one factor.  The other factor was that, you know, I’m hearing from a lot of couples as the awareness of the Theology of the Body is increasing who go to, for instance, weekends or talks, popular talks about Theology of the Body and are getting really excited about what Pope John Paul II had to say about this really as well as which I will put it, this cultural time bomb that is the Theology of the Body.  But then you know, couples will get charged up and then they come home and they stare at each other across the bedroom and say, “Now what?”  Because it takes some doing to translate those really remarkable, incredible, and life-changing ideas of the Theology of the Body into a practical and passionate and realistic plan for marital intimacy.  And so, this book really tries to unpack the Theology of the Body into very practical, simple, direct ways that answers a Catholic’s questions about sexuality but really shows how the Catholic vision of love and marriage is a positive option to what the popular culture is peddling.

Chris:  So what are the usual reasons?  You say that it’s the top reason and that men tend to be the top reason for them initiating, is it that they are just very concerned for how they are coming across in the bedroom with their spouse?  Or what kind of a reason is it that they…

Greg Popcak:  Well, they often admit, it’s more of some kind of disagreement about either frequency or what’s permissible in the bedroom, disagreements between husband and wife about either, you know, different practices or frequency, as I said, is a bigger issue as well.  Just when one person wants to make love more often than the other, how do you deal with those kinds of concerns?  That’s usually what men will raise.  When women discuss sexual issues in the context of counseling, they will often look at it from a sense that they struggle with feelings of being used perhaps because their husbands are not paying attention to them until they want physical intimacy or perhaps they’re afraid of being asked to do something that’s immoral.  A lot of disagreements, for instance, about natural family planning or birth control in general.  How do you negotiate those kinds of differences especially whenever it’s so…you know, so in those cases, of course, you’ve got an objective wall that you’re bumping up against there and the Church is pretty clear about what you can and can’t do with regard to family planning.  But if a husband and wife are in disagreement about that, how do you negotiate something like that?  Everything from that to grayer areas where the Church isn’t quite so clear.  How does a couple negotiate comfort zones around certain sexual practices or positions or frequency and those sorts of things?  You know, the reality is, a lot of couples don’t realize it but sexual problems in a marriage really are the, how do I put it?  The sign of other areas in the relationship, you know, the physical relationship…a couple’s physical relationship is where all the other aspects of the relationship become obvious.  So a couple’s capacity for communication, for partnership, for playfulness, for joy, for a real practical spirituality, all of that gets played in a healthy sexual relationship.  Of course, you know, things like respect or having a good sense of self-esteem or a genuine understanding of what it really means to be loving to each other.  All of that that’s hopefully going on in a relationship all day long, gets played out in the sexual sphere in a very concentrated form.  So whenever there are sexual problems regardless of what they are, they always point back to issues in the larger relationship that are not being resolved as well as they need to be.  And so, you can look at the sexual relationship as kind of a microcosm or a concentrated form of the entire relationship and really see, if you want to make improvements in the physical relationship, but it needs to kind of back up and say, “What can we do to improve these other areas of our marriage so that those benefits can flow into the physical intimacy?”

Chris:  Now one thing that you touched on just a second ago was that the Church has very clear teachings on a lot of the aspects of physical intimacy; however, how do you approach a situation when there is a non-Catholic spouse involved in the mix who does not have that faith background to back up…to participate in sexual intercourse the way a Catholic would?

Greg Popcak:  You know what?  I’ll answer the question, I think you’re asking me then you can kind of correct me if I’m wrong about that.  I mean, so if I’m understanding you, what you’re saying is, when you have a husband and wife who are not on the same page spiritually, say with one spouse is not Catholic and other one is, how do they negotiate that?

Chris:  Yes, yes.

Greg Popcak:  Well, I think that the faithful spouse has to be level in that situation.  That’s a very difficult position to be in but you know, to whom much is given, much is required.  And if the faithful spouse has the knowledge then that faithful spouse has the responsibility to call their mate on and that is a huge issue that we will deal with in the counseling practice.  For instance, when one spouse is really not on board on the Church’s teachings, that can be a special hardship but I run into a lot of people whose faith is very important to them but who will often make compromises and that’s because they want to ease the conflict in their marital relationship.  And I think that’s a mistake.  I think that there is something to this idea of redemptive suffering.  When we stand up for what is true in our faith, even in those areas that are very controversial like sexuality, that’s what ultimately calls our spouse on to holiness and when we make concessions there, then we’re really making an idle lot out of the marriage.

We’re putting what we’re calling “peace in the home” ahead of our duty to God and it’s not really peace in the home anyway.  What it is is it’s settling for quiet as opposed to peace because as Augustine said, “Peace is a tranquility that comes from right order.”  You know, it’s not just the absence of conflict.  So I think that it falls on the faithful spouse to really know why the Church teaches what it teaches, how it is a benefit to stand up for what the Church’s teaching is about sexuality and marriage and to find the support that they need to insist that, “You know, look, you married me as a Catholic and you have an obligation to help me become everything God wants me to be in this life and to be prepared to meet Him in heaven.  And so whether you agree with the Church’s teaching or not, you know that I do and as a matter of simple respect and love for me, you’re going to need to support me on this.”

Chris:  Now you’ve just got a wealth of practical experience in dealing with this which I think is tremendous for an author.  What do find to be the basic building blocks of a healthy, sexual relationship between Catholics?

Greg Popcak:  Well, you know, several things like I was saying before, that the actual day-to-day relationship is absolutely key.  That the couple recognize that there needs to be a continuity between their daily life, their respect, their love, the intimacy, the partnership, the prayer that they share and that is being reflected in their physical relationship as well.  But you know, in the book, I talk about eight different virtues that are at the heart of a healthy sexuality because for the Catholic, living out a healthy sexuality is really about being a virtuous spouse.  So for instance, having a healthy sense of what’s self-donative love is, not just in the sexual sphere but in the day-to-day sphere.  How can I make a gift of myself in a way that really builds up my mate and leads to becoming everything God wants them to be?  Responsibility is another important virtue.  I’m talking there about both self-discipline and stewardship.  In other words, being able to be a person who can be trusted, a person who has good self-control, a person who knows how to prioritize those things that are important over those things that are less important.  That’s a very important quality for physical intimacy because I need to know how to have the self-control to love my mate the way she deserves to be loved.

Faith is absolutely essential.  That’s the third quality for a healthy and holy sexuality because it places the physical intimacy in its appropriate spiritual context and reminds couples that they’re not just loving each other but that they’re supposed to be physical signs of God’s own passion for each of them.  Respect is another one of those eight virtues that I talk about in the book where a couple have to have both self-respect and respect for each other with that desire to really be safe and feel safe with each other and to inspire that healthy vulnerability on which a really authentic and joyful and holy sexuality rests.  Intimacy is the fifth quality that I think couples need to cultivate in their day-to-day relationship which means that they’re comfortable sharing both their emotions as well as their hopes and their dreams in a spirit of noncritical and prayerful discernment and support.

Cooperation in another really important quality that couples need to be practicing in their daily life to exhibit a healthy sexual relationship because how a couple solves problems and negotiate differences of opinion is absolutely going to reflect on their ability to resolve sexual disagreements or sexual issues in the bedroom.  Joy, of course, is another really important quality for a healthy sexuality but it can’t just start in the bedroom.  It’s got to be practiced all day long.  A couple who is not playful, isn’t joyful, doesn’t look for ways to be happy and make each other happy all day long suddenly cant just spontaneously generate that in their sexual relationship.  You have to have that present throughout the day.  And the eighth quality I talked about is the virtue that John Paul II talked a lot about but you don’t hear much about it, it’s called personhood.  In other words, it basically means two things or really, really it’s going to be three things.

The first one is that having an appreciation for what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God; and secondly, having an acknowledgment of the goodness of the body and a respect for the spiritual meaning of the body; and then finally a healthy understanding of what it means to really be a fully functioning Christian man or woman.  So those eight qualities are the virtues that I say that a couple have to be really quite good at practicing in their day-to-day relationship in order for their physical intimacy to really flourish and be what I call, holy sex.

Chris:  Right, well we are going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor and when we come back, we’ll be speaking more with Greg Popcak, Dr. Greg Popcak about Holy Sex!  This is the Catholic Spotlight.

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Chris:  And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight with Dr. Greg Popcak, author of Holy Sex!  A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving.  So Dr. Popcak, one of the things that you really emphasize in your book or at least you start out with is why is sex holy and why is it different from eroticism that we see in so many aspects of today’s society?

Greg Popcak:  Well, I mean that’s an important distinction because honestly, when the Church talks about holy sex or what I call holy sex, they will often get two different reactions from the world.  Either people are scandalized that the Church is making so much out of what they consider to be so little or people are offended because the Church is talking at all about something so earth