Hello and welcome to Cavan Gantz's Live. I'm Sy Kelly, your host, delighted to be here with you. Thank you for being here with us.

We appreciate that you take the time with us. And in appreciation, Darren has arranged what I think might be the best Monday show we've ever done.

This could possibly this will be the high watermark of Monday shows and second hour Scott Han will be here and we'll talk with him about his new book and about about politics and modernity and all of that and this hour.

Dr Chad Pecknold is here with us and we're going to talk with him about politics and Christianity and he's a professor of theology at the Catholic University of America.

And he's currently teaching a course on a Catholic political thought for the institute for Catholic culture. And if you don't know about the institute for Catholic culture, you really should check them out. They're doing among the highest quality work for the general public to enter into the intellectual life of the Catholic church.

It's being done as probably the highest level work being done anywhere. Dr Chad Pecknold, thanks very much for being here with us.

Oh, it's always a pleasure and great to be with you again.

And it's alright that I just introduce you as a professor of theology and didn't classify a particular area of theology.

Well, yeah, I mean, we were talking about this before the show that that my official title is a professor of historical and systematic theology, which I don't like that title because it ties systematic theology to history rather than to metaphysics.

And I think the old title of professor of fundamental and dogmatic theology is better because fundamental theology is really tied to being and not time.

But that being said, I talk a lot about history. So it's not inappropriate to call me a professor of historical theology.

But there's a way of talking about history. And I think this will be part of the theme of what we'll talk about today is we're going to talk about politics and Christianity.

There's a way of talking about history that makes history the the the reigning concern. And there's a way of talking about history that makes God their reigning concern.

Yeah.

And we've been the need too much to history than we can very easily as the modern historian has done leave God out of the whole story.

Well, that's exactly right. And one of the classes I love to teach is on Augustine City of God. And this is partly his his story for us Christians is that we actually have to have we actually have to have a theology of providence.

Our understanding of history has to be driven by God's action in time.

Wow.

Not by time per se.

And I think that's that's exactly the Catholic view.

Otherwise, you turn history into a God, you turn time into a God and you can't do that.

No, because we have a God.

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