I receive a lot of questions via email, messages, snail mail, and smoke signals. I do not always have the time to respond to these messages. But sometimes, I do.

Q: SEAN! Why do you criticize religion? It really shows where your heart is. Where do YOU stand with God, Sean? I worry about your soul, Sean, and I pray for you. We are all sinners… THIS MEANS YOU! YOU ARE A SINNER! Please get right with God! I REALLY don’t want to spend eternity without you!

A: It won’t be so bad. You’ll get used to it.

Q: Do you know the Lord? I don’t think you do. If you did, you would be using your platform to spread the gospel. Your thinly veiled messages of hope are sweet, but sweet people still go to hell. You must speak the Name. If you don’t you are a coward and a liar and the Holy Spirit is not in you.

A: You seem like someone I could be really friends with.

Q: Dear Sean, I just wanted you to know that I have unsubscribed to your column because I was put off by how you described American tourists during your recent trip to Italy. I am American. I travel to Europe extensively. You pissed me off when you described Americans as rude, outspoken, and opinionated.

A: Thank God you’re not one of them.

Q: I am a pastor of a large church, and you recently made a joke in our newspaper, calling megachurches “Six Flags Over Jesus,” just because we have a T-Shirt shop and Starbucks in our lobby. I would like a retraction of this statement. Otherwise, I’ll be discouraging church members from reading more of your work. I don’t think it suits you to compare our church to a theme park.

A: How about a Carnival Cruise ship?

Q: My wife is the sweetest woman on the planet, but I have never known what to buy her for Christmas. Although she would never admit this, I don’t think she has liked any of the past gifts I bought. She wears a big smile, but my gifts just don’t do it for her.

A: I once interviewed a man who had been married for 71 years. He told me two things: (1) Happily married husbands are never right, and (2) always spend more time filling out the card than you did choosing the gift.

Q: Something is bothering me, and I wish you’d address it in one of your future columns. There are some kids in the school where I teach who recently used AI to create dirty images of one of our staff teachers unclothed. It was not funny, it was inappropriate, and the photo didn’t even look like our teacher.

A: I understand your concern. But don’t worry, someday the photos will be a lot more realistic.

Q: Sean, I read you in our paper every week. I wanted to ask whether you are as worried as I am about AI in the field of writing and journalism? Because I just went over to ChatGPT, and told the computer to write in the style of Sean Dietrich and it wrote me a whole essay. I could not tell the difference between your writing and AI’s writing.

A: Then God help AI.

Q: Your writing is formulaic, and often too sarcastic.

A: You are too kind.

Q: Do you even know the difference between “drag” and “drug”?

A: Watch your language. This is a family column.

Q: Where did you learn English? You never, ever, end a sentence with a preposition.

A: What for?

Q: In your last article, you included actual Thanksgiving letters from servicemen from almost every major war. I’m confused on why you did not include the Korean War. My father fought in the Korean War, they called it the Forgotten War because nobody remembers them. And I believe it.

A: Both my grandfather and my uncles served in the Korean War. This war is not forgotten in my household. The truth is, I was not able to find any Thanksgiving letters from actual Korean War servicemen and servicewomen. I will, however, try harder next time. You have my word on that.

Q: Why do all the religious people always pick on you?

A: Because they get sick of picking on each other.