Well, welcome everybody, and tonight we're actually doing a joint broadcast. This is a broadcast of my

podcast. The scriptures are real, and it's also part of our Spark

lecture series. So let me explain to both audiences what each other is. Spark stands for the

Society for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Cultures. It's a society that Brett Nielsen and I started, and now Bethany Jensen is the Secretaryate,

and we kind of keep this thing going, that has a couple of purposes.

One of the purposes is just to make lots of great gospel and ancient world and archaeological

stuff available to people, and one of the purposes is to help

support my excavation and other excavations. So it's a society where we do some fundraising tours.

We do other kinds of fundraising, but mostly what we do are lectures. So we try to do a monthly lecture,

either on a gospel topic or scriptural topic like tonight's lecture on Ruth.

And we try to also do some that are on archaeological topics.

So for example, this next, well, towards the end of this month here in June, Ron and Deb Harris are going to speak.

They've done some work at Petra. We're going to have

Anna Phospin and Chris and South talk about textiles from the time of Christ and what people

would have dressed like. And then in August and then towards the end of August the beginning of

July, I'm going to do another thing on Isaiah since we'll be hitting, come follow me in Isaiah at that point.

And we have lots of people lined up to do both archaeological and scriptural topics.

And I think we have a lot of fun together.

We'll even have, I believe, a get-together in August during education week for those who

are in town.

We'll just have a social or

something like that. So we try and do all sorts of things. So you can join Spark for either

...