Announcing Cross-Examined

A new podcast from Evan Mandery and me launches in a few weeks

Recording our first podcast episode (author photo)

A few months ago, I agreed to start a podcast with someone I had just met—and with whom I disagree about some of life’s most important questions.

I first encountered Evan Mandery through his sharp and provocative book Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us. Not long after, I invited him to a conference I hosted on educating for citizenship. During a break, Evan pitched the idea: He is an atheist; I am a Christian. We’re both lawyers, both teachers, and both convinced that serious disagreement is unavoidable in a diverse democracy. We should start a podcast that models disagreement across hard issues.

The idea was simple but ambitious—two people with meaningful philosophical and religious differences, talking seriously about important issues while demonstrating the kind of disagreement we both think is missing in our society. But I was hesitant. I don’t listen to many podcasts. And I’m wary of turning serious disagreement into just another form of content.

Evan, it turns out, is very persuasive. The more we talked, the more I began to see the podcast not as performance, but as practice—an opportunity to try, in real time, the kind of engagement I’ve written about for years.

We’re calling it Cross-Examined. The title not only gestures at faith but also reflects our legal training. Cross-examination has many purposes, but one of them is testing ideas and clarifying claims. That’s the spirit we hope to bring to each episode. We don’t want to talk past each other, but neither do we want to steer away from the hardest differences, settling for a thin version of civility that avoids disagreement. A pluralistic society depends on something harder: the ability to stay in conversation when convictions actually collide.

We have a trailer, thanks to our amazing producer Olivia Schroder:

As we move forward, we will explore questions like:

• Can genuine friendship survive deep moral and religious disagreement?

• What place, if any, should faith have in public life?

• How do our deepest convictions shape the way we raise children?

• Are there limits to tolerance in a pluralistic society — and who decides?

These aren’t abstract questions for Evan and me; they’re issues that shape our teaching, writing, and public engagement. And they shape how we engage with others as husbands, fathers, colleagues, teachers, and neighbors.

There’s another unusual element to this project: Evan and I are not close friends or colleagues. To the contrary, we had never had a substantive conversation before he proposed this podcast. That means listeners won’t just hear our disagreements. They’ll also hear the slower, more human process of our getting to know one another—learning where trust can grow, where differences remain sharp, and how intellectual partnership develops across these differences.

Our first episode of Cross-Examined drops February 26th. We hope you’ll listen in as the experiment unfolds.