INTERVIEWS WITH INTERESTING PEOPLE 003: RISE OF SKYWALKER

With reflections by Fr. Jim Martin! Kathryn Reklis! Vince Moore! Chris Kent! Mike Hayes! Ken Anselment! Sr. Nancy Usselmann! Eric Clayton! My Family! Juliana Lauletta!

In the fall Fordham University’s Center for Religion and Culture invited me to be on a panel about Star Wars. It was a lot of fun and also really eye opening. I’ve thought and written so much about Star Wars over the years, especially since The Force Awakens, that I had come to think I had pretty much heard it all.

But the other people on the panel, Jack Jenkins from Religion News Service and Dr. Kathryn Reklis from Fordham University, who you’ll meet in a minute, really knocked me. They had such fresh takes on the material; I walked away with so much new stuff to think about.

And it got me thinking, as the Skywalker Saga ends, how great would it be to gather a whole bunch of different people’s points of view? And so I put together a wish list of people that I’ve loved reading or talking to about pop culture. A few will be familiar to readers of the newsletter; but most will almost certainly not be.

And I can’t even begin to tell you how happy I am with the result, about a dozen littl…