Kroll rehearses a couple of lines from the opening of his message, enough to provide a sound check. Downing makes a few adjustments and signals that he's ready. Kroll clears his throat one last time. "Okay, this would be program 6146," he says. "It's 16 minutes long because it's a Monday program. Here's the iq." In the parlance of Back to the Bible, iq is "interactive question."

Kroll wants his daily broadcast to sound informal, so he opens his 25-minute program with a question from his interlocutor, Don Hawkins. Kroll then talks for 16 minutes and Hawkins asks several questions afterward in a gentle and easygoing conversational style that allows Kroll to highlight some of the points from the day's meditation.

The only problem is that Hawkins, who does a late-night call-in program, is seldom in the building when Kroll records the message, so it is Kroll himself who reads the question that he has scripted for Hawkins: "I like your topic this week, Wood, 'becoming a caring Christian.' There always seems to be a shortage of those kinds of people." Kroll responds to himself, "Yeah, Don, that's true, and it's not a shortage of care among those who simply call themselves 'Christian' as opposed to being a Buddhist or a Muslim ...