Hello and welcome to Catholic Answers Live. Happy Thursday June 1st or maybe Friday June 2nd depending on where you are around the world. We're awful glad you're here. Thanks for being here with us. It's an open forum today.

But it's an internet open forum. All of our questions will come from the internet and Jimmy Aiken here to answer them. This is a very special day for Jimmy Aiken senior apologists here at Catholic Answers, the proprietor of Jimmy Aiken's mysterious world, the author of a whole bunch of different things.

Jimmy Aiken today, celebrating his anniversary of coming here to Catholic Answers. Congratulations on this big day, Jimmy.

Thank you. Yeah. My report to work date was by coincidence. This wasn't designed, but was June 1st, the feast of St. Justin Martyr, patron of apologists, which I've always viewed as providential.

And it was June 1st of 1993. So since it's now 2023, that means I've been doing this for 30 years.

That is amazing. And the radio show turned 25 at the beginning of this year. So several of the first years, no radio show. But did you do a media like this? Like maybe it was recorded talks and stuff. How did you?

Well, initially I did a lot of correspondence because this was before the internet. And so the way that people had to the ways that people primarily had to reach us were by letter and by phone call.

And so I would, I would answer a lot of people's questions by letter and by phone call. Eventually we got the internet because that came out and we were an early adopter. So we got Catholic.com.

We also started the radio show after a few years. There was also public speaking and there were, there were, you know, occasional radio interviews and things like that. But we didn't have a regular radio show until we started Catholic Answers live.

So you are longest serving employee now or is Jen Phelps? No, you're not.

She came out of me.

Welcome. Congratulations, Jimmy. 30 years. I mean, you, you must have been an apologist before you came here, but 30 years as a public apologist with Catholic Answers.

Yes. Yeah. And I did have training in apologetics before I came to Catholic Answers.

My academic background is in philosophy and one of the one of the philosophical subjects I focused on was, you know, philosophy of religion.

And so that involved apologetics. Also, I took a lot of medieval philosophy. So that exposed me to a lot of Catholic theology.

I also studied epistemology and metaphysics and things like that. But I had also self training in apologetics, including because of the fact I became Catholic, you know, I had been on a ministerial track in the Protestant community.

But I, it may be the theologies of all different branches of Christendom. And eventually I concluded I need to give Catholicism a closer look.

But by that point, I had years of, you know, theological training in Protestant thought. And so I had to review all of the categories of systematic theology with an open mind to the Catholic position and fight through the arguments, you know, which understanding of this area is better.

I had a lot of a lot of arguments to one learn and, and, and that process of conversion, therefore led to me gaining a background in specifically Catholic apologetics.

It's funny when you say yourself taught in many ways because there wasn't a field of apologetics in those days. I mean, there wasn't like now people, if you say to someone, I want to be an apologist.

People have an image. It's you. It's Jimmy. It's Pat Madrid. You know, it's there, but there was, there's no, I mean, I suppose maybe you, you, you looked back to, you know, Frank Sheed, maybe, or Chester, I don't know, no, no, no, no.

I mean, I knew who Frank Sheed and GKChester, and were, but I was, there was a big Protestant apologetics movement. And so as a result, you know, I, I had contemporary apologists in mind as models.

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