Jay Dyer, it is wonderful to have you back. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Maria. I always enjoy our conversation, so I'm glad to be back.

Likewise, I have to say, you know, since we met in person last year and did our book review of orthodoxy in the religion of the future, we had a lot of good feedback on that and a lot of people interested in this topic.

I recently conducted an interview with an Orthodox priest and I really want to focus on this

subject with you today. I know that we've touched on this in the past, Jay, but viewers may not be

aware of your, you know, previous life and your transition into

orthodoxy. So if you will, just take people through a little bit of that history and you

realizing that the Orthodox Church was the one true church. Yeah, I was raised to Southern Baptist and was nominal.

I mean, we would go some here and there.

And then got more serious about religion in my high school period, my senior year,

I started going to a lot of evangelical Bible studies and church meetings and

decided I would study the history of the church more in depth.

I got into theology and philosophy when I was 1819, started studying that at the academic

level for college and then continued studying that in a related way in grad school,

not so much the theology per se, but worldviews and the idea of what we call worldview warfare

and how systems and worldviews and paradigms work in people's as the models of people's belief

systems. And then in my 20s, I decided that Protestantism didn't really have a lot to offer.

So I got really interested in the history of the church, as I said.

And at that time, a lot of the online discussion for the debates in that sphere were basically just Protestant and Catholic.

So I didn't know about the Orthodox Church in my 20s.

I wasn't averse to it.

I just didn't know much about it.

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