Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count with Carl Truman and Todd Pruitt, a podcast of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Let's join this week's conversation.

Thank you. Welcome to Mortification of Spin. My name's Carl Truman. I'm Professor at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania

and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. And I'm here, as always, with my co-host, collaborator, longstanding, one of my longest standing friends, the Reverend Todd Pruitt, pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Harrisonburg,

Virginia. Good to see you, Todd. Good. You see you, Carl. You know, I refuse to give up on you.

That's why we're still friends. I'm still hanging in there. I appreciate it. The triumph of hope

over experience, I have to say, but I do appreciate that.

How are things going at the church?

Signs of encouragement?

Are you?

We are encouraged, yes.

I mean, God's been very kind, and we're, we continue to build good bridges to our neighbors,

and we're hopefully going to be putting shovels in the ground before too much longer to expand on our building to provide more space.

And so we're excited about that.

And yeah, a lot of interesting things happening.

You know, I think I've told you in the past, the community is really interesting here in Harrisonburg.

We have such a challenging mix of very conservative folks and then very, very liberal folks,

and it all just kind of causes interesting moments in our community every once in a while.

I remember I was watching, this has been a while ago, I was watching CNN, which I hardly ever

watched, but I was tuned into CNN, and I got distracted by it because they were talking about

public school inclusiveness policies.

And they named three school districts in the country that had the most progressive, inclusive,

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