Presenting: Book Keeper

Megan Phelps-Roper opens with a scene that contains the entire tension of her life and her new podcast, Book Keeper. Sitting across from a man she had spent years protesting with signs reading “You’re going to hell,” she is weeping. She had just left the Westboro Baptist Church, the notoriously anti-gay church founded by her grandfather Fred Phelps, and with that decision she lost her entire family. The man across the table, a Jewish blogger named David, told her something she did not expect: “You left on a principle… pretty much the same principles you were raised with.” Leaving Westboro, he said, was the most Westboro thing she could have done. That paradox—that the same stories and teachings that caused so much harm also contained the resources for leaving that harm behind—became the animating question of her life. Now she is returning to the Bible to ask: what in these ancient texts is worth keeping?

The one story that holds the whole question