Hello and welcome to a history of the United States.

Episode 50, Theologycast 2. Remember that this is an

independent podcast which operates on listener support. If you want to sign up for our membership program,

just go to the website, The History of Podcast.com and click on the PayPal subscription button. In our last episode, we brought the story back to

Rhode Island. While we've been covering New England over the past few episodes, Rhode Island

wasn't a part of the United Colonies of New England. It was more doing its own thing. After spending

the last episode recapping and going through the process by which the land was acquired from the

Indians, today we can get a bit more into just what Rhode Island was doing, namely, religious controversy aplenty.

This is why we'll be having our second Theology cast episode, to get into all the

theology goodness. But before we do, I just want to reiterate the disclaimer at the end of the last episode.

I'm not a theologian. I'm a historian. And so I have to deal with a lot of subjects I wouldn't

consider myself an expert in necessarily, but which I'm able to speak with some authority.

Today, not so much.

Theology is well outside of my training as a historian,

and it is also something that people who are interested in

generally care very passionately about,

so I'll do my best today,

but please understand that if I make a mistake, my not properly

understanding some subtle distinction between one particular theological perspective and another,

it's just an honest mistake from someone deeply confused by the subject.

So, where do we begin? I think that we should begin with Socrates, partly because I do

actually know a lot about Socrates, and also because he held a very similar belief to the

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