Well, thank you for coming this event. It's an honor to share the stage with with John Harris and Russell Fuller.

It's also my first time in Wisconsin. It's beautiful here.

And it's after publishing this book I've been to many

places and America is a very diverse and beautiful place and this just adds to my impression of that.

So thank you for being here again.

Yeah, as John said, I did come out with this book.

I want to say years in the making, I guess,

but there it is and so today I want to talk

about the importance of great men in light of reformed theology and reform thought. So it's the idea of the

of the great man. You probably have heard something like that before that I want to just

kind of expand and talk a little bit more about that and and if you

have any questions like John said please write those down we'll try to address those later

but I want to start off with a quote by a French intellectual. I know starting with a French quote is probably not a good idea. But this guy was one of the good ones in my estimation. Ernest Renaw, he said great men, glory, I mean the genuine kind. This is the capital

stock upon which one bases a national idea.

So the great man is the capital stock upon which one bases a national idea.

The idea being that if we have a nation, part of that of thinking about what the nation is, who we are in relation to the nation,

our attachment to it is in part, not only, but is in part the history of the great people that did great works on behalf

and for that nation.

And so as Americans, who would you say is one of the greatest?

Someone can, starts with the W, not Wolf.

Washington, yes, thank you.

It's George Washington, my personal favorite founding father.

...