Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Interview with Joseph Shallit



Here's a rarity: a July 1967 interview with my father, Joseph Shallit, conducted by interviewer Gene Poll, about my father's piece in the Reader's Digest, "We're Up to Deuteronomy". Yes, we really did read and discuss the Bible at dinner when I was 9 years old. The interview is in mp3 format.

2 comments:

paul01 said...

If it's not being too nosy, how do you evaluate the experience, now that you are an adult?

Jeffrey Shallit said...

To tell the truth, I don't remember it very well (I was only 9 when the interview was conducted). I don't evaluate the Bible as highly as my father did, and we haven't read it to our own kids. When I argue with religious Christians, I do find that I often know more about the Bible than they do -- even though I don't know very much at all.

My father conducted a bunch of educational "experiments" on us, and most of them were extremely beneficial in the long run. He taught me how to write, how to evaluate an argument, how to do research in the library, and how not to take "no" for an answer.