Admittedly the video that I link to below is a few months old, but I just came across it for the first time thanks to a brief write-up it received in the most recent issue of Relevant.
I should say that if I had to make a list of the public figures I would most like to have a conversation with, Stephen Colbert would easily crack the top 10. No really, he would. And I don’t mean the character he plays on TV, I mean the real guy. While I very rarely watch his show (don’t have cable), I find it to be smart, clever, and pretty dang funny. More than that, I find Colbert himself to be both a brilliant actor (his character is amazing), and a fascinating individual (an opinion derived from both his show and the few out-of-character interviews I’ve managed to find). He talks about God quite a bit on his show, often in an either irreverent or tongue-in-cheek fashion, and yet maintains that he is a Sunday school teacher at his church.
In the interview below, he talks with Philip Zimbardo, a professor at Stanford (and conductor of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment that anyone who has ever taken a post-secondary psychology or sociology class has studied ad naseum), about his book The Lucifer Effect. To make a long story short, Colbert seems to slip out of character towards the end of the interview and gives Zimbardo quite the theological lecture. While he uses a rather unfortunate selection of words at the end, the preceding 30 seconds provide an interesting dose of Arminian theology…not exactly standard fare on the late night talk show circuit. The reaction of the audience to his outburst is also intriguing. My interest in what is actually going on in Stephen Colbert’s head has been further piqued.
I couldn’t figure out how to post this video directly onto my blog, but you can find it here.
2 Comments
April 19, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Stephen Colbert tellin’ it like it is. That got me all wound up!
April 19, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Such a weird interview all the way around. Thanks for the link. Just like an ogre, this one’s got layers.