Hello there and welcome to the thinking Fellows podcast. My name is Caleb.

And today I am joined by John Hoyam, who's my friend and a junior fellow in the Thinking Fellowship at 1517.

You can find out more about the Thinking Fellowship by going to 1517.org and clicking the contributors tag.

There you can see a list of all the contributors and the category that they fall into,

whether that's senior distinguished fellow, fellow or junior fellow, as well as some of the

guest authors and guest podcasters we've had throughout the years. If you go there and you

find somebody of interest to you or somebody you might know,

you can click and there's a drop-down and it'll show you all the latest content

that they've been a part of making or contributing to at 1517.

So that's probably worth a go if you want to see more of, say, what John's written or said before.

Today, we are still in between confessions, and we are going to be taking some listener

questions and giving our best answers to them.

And these are fun to me because, you know, we go, the confession series has some strengths and some weaknesses.

The obvious strength is that we get to read through the confessions again, both as hosts and

some listeners on the show, and we get to help facilitate maybe a study of them for people

who's interactions with the Lutheran confessions might stop at the end of

the catechisms.

And it's been fun over the last half a year, basically, to go through those.

And I look forward to closing those out.

I would say the drawback is that there's less opportunity for listener engagement than there is with some of our other

series or even when we've done more regular Q&As. And I just don't want to break up that

content too much. So that's why we're taking sort of a big break right now to address as many

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