Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Dr. Jeffrey J. Ventrella, where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is another edition of the Director's Bag.
Our readers and listeners by now have received 52 emails from Truth Exchange called the Director's Dicta. And some of our listeners and readers are aware of the transition that's taken place this year, with Dr. Peter Jones passing the baton over to Dr. Jeffrey Ventrella. If you have followed Truth Exchange for any length of time, you'll know that Jeff is a longtime friend of the ministry as well as serves on the board. He is one of our Truth Exchange fellows. He has been at and spoken at numbers of our think tank and symposium. And so Jeff has been contributing every week, the dicta. And so, first off, what does dicta mean?
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Well, thank you, Joshua, and I think that's going to be an important question. So dicta, of course, is just Latin for speech generally, but it comes, comes from. It's a shortened version of what we use in the legal profession called orbiter dicta, meaning something said alongside that comes alongside, and there's some legal doctrines that apply to it. The idea here is that when we call it a dicta, it means that in addition to the overall thrust of the ministry, we're offering apologetic cultural commentary on particular worldviews issues. In other words, looking at them, examining them, exposing them, exploring them in a way that allows us to take our journey of faith more seriously by being informed. And so the dicta is a way to come alongside and to assist, to inform the public, but also to equip the church so that they can understand what's happening before their eyes. Because oftentimes worldviews, as Francis Schaeffer said, are more often hot than pot. We just, you know, passively inhale worldview things, and instead we need to be more intentional. So the dictas are designed to make us intentional about cultural apologetics, things that are occurring, put it this way, old errors that express themselves in new ways or dealing with hot button issues, those sorts of things. So that's, that's the concept of why we're doing these dicta. We want to serve our constituents, both our donors and our listeners, of course, and our readers, and we thought we would provide something both serious and scriptural for them. There's far too much playing patty cake in this arena, or the fearlessness or perhaps fearfulness, I should say, or spinelessness to actually deal with it. And Scripture tells us that if the bugle is muted, the bugle is unclear, people won't know how to proceed to the battle to assault, shall we say, the gates of hell. And that's what we're called to do in this time of Advent, this idea of understanding that the king has come in the work and person of Christ and how we are to pray that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven, which is in fact a manifestation of the kingdom of God. And so this is designed to pursue that in a way that is, again, serious and scriptural. And that's why we have the dicta. And we can talk a little bit more about why, why in this format, so we, you know, can go on with that.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: That's one of the things I've always appreciated, or I have appreciated deeply from receiving the dicta. To put it on the website is one is the flood of footnotes. And within that also, you have wonderfully woven a lot of scripture and cultural content. So news, facts, there are things that are happening in the news. You're quoting people all over the place. And there. There is just a lot of information. And so how can. How would you recommend for our readers? And it seems like some of our readers range in all ages. We have high school, college, professional. And to retired readers of the dicta, what's the best way to tackle these pieces?
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. So they have a very particular focus and it's almost 100% utilized. So one thing is there is often an introductory sort of paragraph or two which kind of gives you the overlay that will send you the direction. If you just want to understand kind of what we're hitting. You know, I would read that part of it, just the first part of it. And I usually end it with the phrase, let's get to the gist. Everything after that is an exposition of kind of the main thematic point. So if you're pressed for time or whatever, you can just read that first part and say, ah, okay, that's interesting. I'm interested in that. I'll get to that later. I'll put at the top of my tabs or however people want to consume the stuff. So I think that's one of the markers. I use a style intentionally called what I call Ska pop.
That's not some new musical term, but it's the idea of. It's scholarly, but it's also popular. So the dicta is meant to be read, first of all, just read through the main text it's not designed to be. And sometimes I can write densely, but it's designed to be very scholarly, almost conversational. I'll use first and second person more than third person. And it's designed just to flow and to ask questions and to prompt the reader to reflect. So I would just read and ignore the footnotes, just go through it and make the comments. Then I would go back if you have further interest. The footnotes are designed to justify or to verify or to expand the particular points made to let people know we're not just opining here, but we're grounding things in good research and in scriptural mandate. And so if you want nuance, if you want the exception to the exceptions, if you want to know sourcing or you want further study, then go back and read the footnotes. They tell an additional story that comes alongside and supports the overall thesis, if you will, of the dicta. So you can read it in three ways. The introduction, the actual text, and then the footnotes. We say, when we're trying to develop a Christian worldview, we need to be people who follow the footnotes. We need to have a great appreciation for what's gone before and to explore and to see if these things are true. So in the spirit of being bereans, we search the scriptures, we also search the footnotes and whatnot, just to see, okay, does that make sense? Is it coherent? It's interesting that I've had people comment to me, it's like, well, yeah, but you didn't really address, you know, X. It's like, yeah, I did footnote 26.
So, I mean, that's. I appreciate that, but it's like, it's hard and, you know, bouncing around up and down, looking at footnotes. But they're there to let the people know that we're not half caught, that we do desire to be serious, scholarly and scriptural.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: Excellent. And how to use a dicta.
[00:08:07] Speaker A: Yeah, so there's a number of things. We have some ideas about that, actually.
So one of the things we'd like to do, this is not the first idea, but it's the second idea, is with the proper resourcing, we would actually begin to compile some of these that are thematically related and then produce monographs, books and study guides. But we can also, as part of that, produce even kind of questions and study guides. So I've had a number of people print off the dictas and use them for their various gatherings, whether it's youth group, Bible studies, or those sorts of things. And Just use them as discussion pieces because they are, they're actually shorter than people think. The footnotes make them longer, but they are shorter. And they can be read and they can be, they're designed to be provocative at points, but hopefully provocative with a breath mint. So it's like, look, we want to be faithful, we want to be referees, we want to call balls and strikes. So one way to do that is to, you know, print them off, have people or have people read them in advance and then discuss those kinds of issues. We had that a lot with the critical theory and those sorts of things. We had that with the so called Christian nationalism and some of these other areas. And we've had them with respect to paganism in the pews. People are going, oh my, I didn't realize this. And so there's been some healthy discussions going on there, some mature discussions, judging by some of the feedback we've been getting.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. And I have made use of them in men's Bible studies, women and one on one. And they have been a great, great asset to me and those discussions.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: And I'll tell you, and this, I mean, not to interrupt, but I'm using them at the law school level. I'm having some of my, when I go in and do special seminars, they're going to be reading some of these materials because you can't understand law in a vacuum. You've got to understand it in a cultural, broader worldview context. And so what we're doing is we're putting together the cultural and then the specific discipline, which is what we do at the every square inch gatherings that we do in September, we have a date for that now as well. So I hope everyone's starting to mark that on their calendars.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: Yes, that's right. And that's in September, September 27th, I believe. Dr. Mitchell, what about next year? What kind of things can our readers and listeners expect to be hitting their mailbox? Are you going to be doing a little bit of everything from addressing cultural matters that are in the current events to specific themes? Are you going to go into things like we've had some people ask, are you going to deal with maybe theological proper issues? Are you going to deal with church matters and things of that nature?
[00:10:59] Speaker A: If there, if there is an interest in that, we can certainly do that. We have the resources. But I think what you'll find is what we want to do also is have our content even boosted further. And so we are in the planning stages of not only continuing the director's bag, this particular podcast. And that can go in several directions, as we have done this year. But also to begin to take our Truth Exchange scholars and have roundtable discussions on some of these issues. I think, I don't know, maybe once a month, maybe once a quarter, but we'll bring people in. Sometimes schedules are difficult to put people together, but I think that's going to be really helpful to see, you know, subject matter experts really begin to kick around these dialogues on some of these fundamental kinds of issues. So you can expect that. You can also expect to see more and more. I don't like to call them guest articles, but we want to drive some of the content again from our scholars to have them provide kind of shorter kinds of blog like blurbs. And again, we need resources to do that because the laborer is worthy of their hire. Although all of our scholars would be glad to pen some things, we want to be able to help them out because they are taking time to do that. So we'd like to get some folks to help sponsor. We're going to have more of those kinds of things. If you have been reading us faithfully, you've seen we've had an Advent series by a number of our scholars and we hope to be able to do those kinds of things, not necessarily tied to the church calendar per se, but to deal with particularized good issues. Because as valuable as we are on this team and people have a lot of chops on the Truth Exchange team, we benefit from cross pollinating and platforming others. And so we anticipate seeing that. We'd also like to kind of focus on building our exposure through our Truth Exchange intensives. We want to serve the church. That's one of our goals of the ministry, one of our reasons for being actually and to equip the church. And we want to be able to come and put together a handcrafted series of presentations with our scholars and address where the itch is, scratch it, where it is, and in a local setting. So we've had some really good interest in that. We just need to concretize that and set that up, which gives us great opportunities as we travel to various churches and whatnot. That means we're going to be closer to you, those listeners, and we'd be glad to have receptions or dinners or anything like that so that we can further explain and expand kind of where we're going with respect to Truth Exchange. And there's some other plans as well where we're building out what we call the Irenaeus Fellowship or the Truth Exchange Fellowship, and we're just looking to raise the right funds to make that happen as well. Pretty exciting.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: This concludes a recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth Exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the Director's Bag. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
