But in kind of general terms, Danny, how do you think publishing and writing serve the church, both in your own ministry, but also more widely?

I mean, I'm an accidental author in many ways, you know.

Well, maybe that's not being entirely generous to me.

But I did a PhD to write a book.

But the reason I wanted to write a book was because I recognized that particularly on this topic of singleness, there was a real need within certainly the church that I was part of very broadly and that I was aware of more generally of a need for actually some deep but very accessible things theological reflection on this topic.

And so a number of people have been encouraging me for years, you should write a book on singleness.

And I got to the point where I thought, well, okay, I could do that.

Yeah.

A season, a season of singleness.

A season of singleness, the not yet married singleness or, you know, the gifted singleness.

And that's another whole conversation we could get onto.

But you know, if your singleness is, if you feel really called to singleness, then it's, it's legitimate.

But if you're like me and we should probably say, I'm not married, I've never been married.

I thought I would be, I expected that I would get married.

Um, and that just hasn't been God's plan for me.

But what are your thoughts on how we are currently... idealizing and idolizing marriage to the detriment of both married people and single people in the church.

this.

Later on he says, you know, I don't have a command from the Lord, but as one whose judgment is trustworthy, my advice is this is what I say.

So there's things like that we have to kind of go, How is Paul talking here? How do we exegetically understand that? And then there are some more sort of obvious exegetical difficulties, some of which we might come back to in our discussion where we need to make some decisions about what we think Paul is actually saying because it's not entirely clear and what the implications of that are.

So there's exegetical complexities in this passage.

There's also historical complexities.

You know, 21st century...

West is a very different place to first century Corinth, culturally, sociologically, all those things.

All right, back to the episode.