Alan Graham

Joe Rogan opens by saying he learned about Alan Graham through John Paul DiGiorgio and calls Graham's community the best example he has seen of making progress on homelessness. Graham says the organization, Mobile Loaves and Fishes, is 26 years old and was founded in 1998. It began as a simple plan to drive a catering truck onto the streets and feed people. The idea came from a conversation he and his wife had with a friend about a ministry in Corpus Christi, Texas, where several churches pooled their resources on cold winter nights to help people living on the streets.

as a distribution mechanism from those of us that have abundance to those that lack.

Graham, who calls himself a serial real estate entrepreneur, jokes that every idea seems brilliant to someone like him. He traces the deeper origin to a church retreat a couple of years before the founding. He says he would not have gone if he had known it meant 30 hours of men holding hands and hugging. The experience left him asking God what small things he could do. He says that question, along with a series of later events, led to the organization and then to the community.

Asked why he focused on homeless people, Graham first explains how his faith changed. He openly calls core Christian claims hard to accept: the virgin birth, the execution and resurrection of Jesus, the descent into hell and the ascension. He says that at some point a believer has to decide to let faith carry them past those claims.

These are incredulous things to believe.

He gives a personal reason for coming back to the church. Before 1996 his wife, Tricia, started taking their children to Sunday mass without him, and he saw it as "the train was leaving the station." He ties that to his own childhood: his father left, divorced his mentally ill mother, and left Graham and his three brothers with her. He becomes emotional mentioning that he and Tricia will mark 40 years together this year. He says he joined the family and became fascinated by church history, including the schisms, heresies, wars and reformations.

What a train wreck this whole deal is. Yet at the center of that deal remains this Jesus of Nazareth.

He admits that at that stage his belief was intellectual and that he "had no factual things to take me there." He says the retreat moved that belief into his heart, and that this is where the real change began.

It became more of a heart relationship with Christ as opposed to an intellectual thing.

Rogan asks how Graham handles claims that seem impossible. Graham answers that we live in a universe of the unknown, and that what we know is "probably extraordinarily limited," though far more than 500 or 600 years ago. His example is transistors: people now fit a million of them onto something the size of a fingernail. He says he can't picture this and can't see it, but he believes it.

Rogan disagrees with the analogy. He says transistors are understood and can be checked. There are schematics, the parts can be seen under a microscope, the manufacturing process is known and scales, and there is a documented history of their invention. He then mentions what he calls "a little kooky piece of trivia": the UFO folklore claim that the transistor and fiber optics were reverse-engineered from crashed craft and appeared around 1947, after Roswell. Graham replies that he has never seen a UFO.

The transistor thing, like first of all, we have schematics. We understand how they work.

Asked whether God might have created life elsewhere, Graham says it is "completely possible" and calls himself a doubting Thomas by temperament. He describes Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Thomas, an image he says hangs in the sanctuary at the village. He points to Thomas's furrowed forehead, his eyes looking away, and his torn garments, which Graham says make him look "like he's homeless." He also points to the compassion in Christ's face and the way Christ guides Thomas's finger into the wound. He says the disciples were fishermen and "just guys," and that Thomas still ended up saying "my Lord, my God." Graham mentions that he gives a talk called the Gospel Concarne, "the gospel with meat." On aliens he says plainly, "I don't know."

Asked whether he approaches religion with the same doubt, Graham says he approaches it through faith, and he explains why with his mother's story. When he was four, she spent a year in a mental hospital. He says she was given "the most powerful psychotropic drugs known to man" and electric shock therapy. During that year his father filed for divorce and tried to take away her rights as mother of their four boys. Graham says she won "because she had great parents." She later became a Roman Catholic and took her sons to church. He says he remembers little from that age but remembers her love for Christ and Mary, and that seeing them bring her "tremendous relief" affected him.

I don't get into apologetic arguments with people. This is just who I am and how I express who I am.

Rogan says that, whether or not religious people are right, their faith clearly affects them deeply, and the relief Graham describes can benefit people and communities. Graham says he leaves disputes to God and keeps one simple rule for himself. Rogan adds that some people dismiss this way of living, and even its beauty, only because it comes attached to religion.

God created all this. He's going to have to sort all the bullshit out. I'm not the sorter outer.

Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

The two disagree briefly about human history. Graham says that what people have done in the name of religion, or of non-religion, shows that "we've screwed the pooch." Rogan points to progress such as penicillin and says no one would want to have lived 5,000 years ago.

Graham then describes the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage he walked the year before to mark the 25th anniversary of Mobile Loaves and Fishes. He gives these details: