Hello there and welcome to the Thinking Fellows podcast. My name is Caleb and today I'm joined by

our regular hosts, Dr. Adam Francisco and Rod Rosenblatt and then a guest today, Joel Esch from

Concordia Irvine. We've launched one episode in May so far. We're recording now so we're kind of

doing some special topics this month because we did

the Rod's outline on Martin Kempnitz's Two Nature's in Christ, which was responded to very well.

We had within an hour of that episode going up, listeners emailing us thanking Dr. Rosenblatt for the

work on those outlines, which is fantastic, which is the goal of kind of

that new sub-series that we're going to be doing of exploring some of those outlines that you've

been doing because those have been waiting to come out for so long. Yep. And then we have a Q&A

episode coming out later this month. But what we're going to talk about today is the intersection of faith and technology.

And this was brought up because Concordia Irvine for now the second year in a row is hosting

what's called the Crosswise Institute. And they challenge high schoolers to think, which is kind of rare in our

day. But they're going to do stuff about the intersection of theology and technology and really

make people question things.

And Dr. Esch is, what are you at Crosswise?

What do you do?

And Concordia Irvin, why don't you introduce yourself to the listeners?

With regards to Crosswise, I'm the executive director,

part of a three-person leadership team, if you will. It's been putting this on now for two years, although we've had Crosswise in existence for three. We won a Lilly Endowment Grant.

They were looking for high school colleges that might do a summer high school program that would kind of talk about the issues of culture, bring their faith traditions to bear, and have the conversation happen in a way that was lasting and meaningful as opposed to like a one-off one-day experience. So we parlayed that into six days during the summer where we would get students from all over the country. Last year we had 36 kind of show up. We had them from I think six or seven different states. Really great experience.

Yeah, we talked about technology, particularly digital technology as it relates to transhumanism,

which might come up as a topic today. We'll see how it goes. But a fascinating discussion.

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