WIN A COPY OF ‘UNLIKELY DISCIPLE’!

KEVIN: Well, if it makes you feel better, the 300-page book is set in REALLY BIG FONT. No, I’m joking. Actually, I have no idea what happened. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but I thought it was something people did in their thirties after they’d exhausted all other career options…

MATTHEW: Wait. Is that a dis toward me? I’m kidding.

KEVIN: (Laughs) Then this crazy opportunity presented itself, and I got an unexpected chance to tell an amazing story. I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.

MATTHEW: So the premise of Disciple is that you transferred to “God’s college” Liberty University from one of “Satan’s colleges” (he has many, you know…) Brown University, so tell me… what Liberty “law” were you most anxious about? You know, the one “rule” that you thought you’d have the most trouble following.

KEVIN: The hardest rule to follow, without a doubt, was Liberty’s ban on cursing. I don’t smoke or drink heavily or conduct occult rituals, but I do enjoy a good four-letter word now and again. And at Liberty, cursing can get you as many as 18 reprimands. (For perspective, 30 reprimands generally gets you kicked out.) So I had to retrain myself. I actually bought a self-help book, called “30 Days to Taming Your Tongue,” that taught me how to replace my curses with words like “Glory!” and “Mercy me!” I sounded like Beaver Cleaver for a few days, but at least I didn’t get expelled.

MATTHEW: You write in your book about witnessing a guy named Jersey Joe becoming famous for “naked skateboarding” in the men’s dorm… please tell us more. And did you partake in the uh, “fun”?

KEVIN: Jersey Joey is quite a character. He was Liberty’s version of a rebel – he didn’t fornicate or smoke weed, but he was prone to pranking the innocent pastors’ kids on the hall. He’d sneak into the bathroom while they were taking showers and steal their towels, so they’d have to run back to their rooms butt-naked while everyone cheered them on. I love the guy, but I never joined him on his escapades.

MATTHEW: As fate would have it, you ended up being the last person to sit down and interview Jerry Falwell. When I was a kid, I loved Jerry! As I got older, I became a pretty vocal critic of his seemingly hateful politically-and-socially limiting “sound bites.” What did you think of him? And can you tell us something about him that might surprise us?

KEVIN: I was never a big fan of Jerry Falwell. Growing up, it was almost forbidden to speak his name in my house, like Voldemort or something. But during my Liberty semester, I got to see what his followers liked about him. He could be charming and folksy, almost grandfatherly. And when I got to interview him for Liberty’s campus newspaper a few weeks before he died (it was the last print interview of his life, as it turned out) he told me that he loved practical jokes. They found three boxes of stinkbombs in his desk when he died. It doesn’t excuse the “politically-and-socially limiting” things he did, but it might help explain his huge following.

MATTHEW: I don’t want you give away the ending, but can you tell us one thing that you–the “flaming liberal from Satan’s university”–learned while at Liberty?

KEVIN: Basically, I learned that the secular paranoia about a place like Liberty – that there are 10,000 undergraduates who do nothing all day but sit around sewing Hillary Clinton voodoo dolls and writing angry letters to the ACLU – has almost no basis in fact. The Liberty students I met were socially and politically conservative, but as college kids go, they were all fairly normal. They gossiped about girls, worried about jobs, complained about the amount of homework they had – all the things my friends at Brown do.

MATTHEW: Lastly, if somebody was thinking about venturing out on this kind of experience, you know, leaving the comfort of their “life” and engaging the culture/lifestyle/experience of another, what would be your advice to them?

KEVIN: Do it! In To Kill a Mockingbird (sorry, I’m an English major), Atticus Finch gives his daughter a piece of advice: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” I think we should all spend time with the people who seem to have nothing in common with us – it makes us more empathetic, and I think it helps break down barriers.

MATTHEW: Oh, one more question… Rob Bell LOVES your book. And I LOVE Rob Bell. How’d you end up scoring his endorsement?

KEVIN: I didn’t expect to score it at all, actually. I sent a book to his office thinking that he might accidentally trip on the box and decide to open it. But he wrote back several days later telling me how much he loved the book. I was a huge fan of Rob’s before that, but I’m borderline reverent now.