Alex Shephard interviews Daniel Radosh, Daily Show writer

From Full Stop:

While visiting his wife’s family in Kansas in 2005, Daniel Radosh accompanied his sister-in-law to an evangelical Christian rock festival. At one point, one of his sister-in-law’s friends ran up to him and exclaimed, “That was awesome! They prayed like three times in a 20-minute set!” From that moment, Radosh writes in Rapture Ready, he “had to know what it meant to judge a band by how hard it prayed rather than how hard it rocked.”

Published in 2008, Rapture Ready is Radosh’s account of the “parallel universe” of Christian pop culture. Part travelogue, part investigation into the fault lines of the culture and its intersections with the mainstream, the reader follows Radosh as he attends Christian wrestling matches, alternative Christian music festivals, and Kentucky’s gargantuan Creationism Museum. While Rapture Ready may not be as well known as other excellent investigations of evangelical Christian culture, such as The Year of Living Biblically, it is the funniest and the most moving – Radosh is never cynical, always probing, and remarkably sharp.

Before joining the staff of The Daily Show in 2009, Radosh was a freelance writer whose work was published in The New Yorker, McSweeneys, GQ, and The New York Times, among many others. He also wrote and maintained Radosh.net, the loss of which I hope to mourn in Full Stop someday in the future. Over breakfast, we spoke about the past year at The Daily Show, the ways in which evangelical culture has shifted since the election of Barack Obama, and the best books he read in 2010.

More here.