You're listening to the Bible for normal people, the only God ordained podcast on the internet.

I'm Pete Ends.

And I'm Jared Bias.

Hello everybody. Welcome to this episode of the podcast. Our topic today is

what is Byzantine Christianity and why should we care and our guest

is Dr. Meredith Riedel and she is a scholar and writer specializing in

Byzantine Christianity.

Yeah, and I think this is important in a lot of the themes that we talk about at the Bible for normal people.

If you can pull from it beyond the the specificity of Byzantine Christianity, which I think is interesting in its own right.

But just the themes that as we talk about how it broadens our view of the Christian faith and how there's many options.

People practicing many things and I loved, you know, one thing is how rooted it is in historic Christian expression.

Because it hasn't focused on innovation or doing new things, but has really preserved a lot of what probably was a pretty ancient practice of faith.

Right. Right. It was a thousand year of reign. So to speak of Byzantine Christianity, which still has many resonances today.

It's still ripple effects. That's even understating. It's not ripple effects, but the orthodoxies, the Greek orthodoxy, Russian orthodoxy,

are like direct descendants of Byzantine Christianity.

Yeah. And something that many of us, including us, Jared, never learned about.

And we went to seminary and we never learned about this stuff. And it's just so fascinating.

And I think very liberating to absolutely. All right. Let's get into it.

There is a Christian empire that lasted over a thousand years. And we don't study it in the West.

And today in our current milieu, we are struggling with issues of Christian nationalism, the relationship of church and state,

which is something that Byzantium wrestled with for a thousand years. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.

You need to know about history in order not to not repeat its mistakes.

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