The Walt Sessions

Dylan Terrell

This is a series of conversations between George Terrell and Walt Reiner, held over several years in the mid-1990s as well as some additional recordings and interviews with Walt. Read the full description here: https://tinyurl.com/walt-sessions

  1. 2025-06-08

    Episode 21

    March 3rd, 1996 In this sweeping and reflective conversation, Walt revisits the arc of his personal and political evolution—from WWII soldier to community organizer to radical educator—grounded in experience rather than ideology. He opens by expressing gratitude for the young people who took risks to work alongside him over the years and begins tracing the shifts in his thinking, marked by a journey through socialism, communism, and organized religion. Much of the episode centers on Walt’s intense and self-funded efforts in Germany during the 1980s to introduce the writings of French theologian Jacques Ellul—whom Walt calls one of the great but ignored thinkers—to German students and institutions. He recounts teaching in German, paying to translate an entire book, and ultimately winning credibility through a powerful candlelight speech at a major student rally in Germany. “Think globally, act globally” becomes a theme, rooted in these direct experiences. Walt also reflects on the origins of Project Neighbors and the Prince of Peace Volunteers, rooted in local risk-taking by youth, not institutional support. He critiques leftist movements for being overly fixated on economic definitions of poverty, arguing instead for a broader understanding of what it means to be uprooted and dehumanized. Marx, Mao, the Black Panthers, and organized religion all fall short in different ways—yet faith, especially if truly lived out from the bottom up, remains for Walt the only enduring source of revolutionary strength. The episode closes with a discussion about two new homes being supported by Project Neighbors and the informal, decentralized networks making them possible. Walt argues this “un-American” way—of people giving without strings—is closer to real change than anything he has experienced. But he also wonders aloud how to honor and deepen it without institutionalizing it: “Something is being born here.”

    1h 33m
  2. 2025-01-12

    Episode 20

    February 25th, 1996 A sprawling conversation, from personal philosophies, to current thoughts on work with Project Neighbors, to more on Walt’s history. Starting from a conversation on family values to the individual, and the destruction of the individual. Walt touches themes such as what it means to be a “true revolutionary” and moving against the state and “high tech,” before getting into more tangible work with Project Neighbors and how to build relationships, support one another, and moving away from “charity.” On talking about some of the families they have worked with in Valparaiso, and getting closer towards how Walt sees the world, he says: “I hate to use the word ‘make it.’ First of all, they won’t ‘make it’ in terms of the world. And secondly, I don’t want them to ‘make it’ in terms of the world. I want them to live and not just survive.”  From there, Walt and George dive into Walt’s history a bit during the Urban Studies program from 1968-1982. Walt talks about preparing to apply to go to Germany as an “out” financially, and spends years working on his German, spending summers working in Germany, and even working towards a PhD in Germany to apply to the Reutlingen program at Valparaiso University. Walt tries to move on, talking about how big Chicago/Cabrini Green were, and how Valparaiso was more manageable, but George brings him back to those 15 or so years during Urban Studies, where they talk about what fatherhood was like for Walt during that time – splitting himself, and his family – between Chicago and Valparaiso.  Walt ends reflecting on that time:  "After war and poverty, the other thing that has most affected my life – I'm leaving Lois out; she transcends it all – has been the fact that the students I've been with, have all been special students. Almost every single Urban Studies student in 20 years had to fight their faculty advisor, fight their parents. 'Why don't you go to Florence? Why don't you go to Cambridge?' ...'I don't want you to go to Chicago.' They had to want to come to the city....They were special students. They made some risky choices."

    1h 27m
  3. 2024-01-25

    Episode 15

    October 22nd, 1995 Walt and George start by discussing the Million Man March, organized by Louis Farrakhan and others to promote Black men taking responsibility and leadership in their families, communities and the country. Walt talks about how black families were not as violent and disconnected before the dominance of the welfare state. He says that both the left and the right are able to look at things like Brown versus the Board of Education and bussing as both bad and good. Positions are solidified-no gray areas. Policies to assure survival but are necessary but they also kill creativity. The focus on electing the right person as the number one focus for Black people diverts from taking creative control of their lives and their communities. Need a balance of focus between what is necessary and what is creative, which is true in religion, politics and other arenas. Absolutizing the law is the most dangerous component of Islam and Christianity as well as the Democrats and the Republicans. Walt also talked about the focus of “atonement” in the March and said that it is essential to look at history and understand the depth of the origins of the slave trade as including Islam. History is a “recounting of man’s absurdities.” He talked about the fact that really listening to one of the Black women that Project Neighbors has helped would offer more history than we could ever find -he has learned so much from her. He wanted so much to get her story out and talked about how to do it.

    1h 23m

About

This is a series of conversations between George Terrell and Walt Reiner, held over several years in the mid-1990s as well as some additional recordings and interviews with Walt. Read the full description here: https://tinyurl.com/walt-sessions