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TranscriptBrian:    Hello and welcome to Unapologetic. Today, we're going to have a different type of episode, where I'm going to interview a good friend of mine, AJ Rhodes. AJ, welcome to the show.AJ:    Thanks for having me.Brian:    You're welcome. I have some questions for you, and we're going to dialogue a little about Apologetics and it's role in your life, and how you approach it. Just so you all know, I've been friends with AJ for years. I'm actually in his Sunday School class at my church when I'm able to go. We ride bikes, and He tries to get me to exercise in more than my garage. Sometimes he's successful with that and sometimes he's not. I've seen from my prospective, Apologetics be helpful in AJ's life, and so I wanted to dialogue about that. AJ, how would you define apologetics?AJ:    Apologetics is at it's core, just giving a defense for your worldview. For us as Christians, that's defending a Christian worldview, so being able to give reasoned arguments or to know reasoned arguments, to justify the beliefs that you hold. For Christians, that's going to be foundational things like belief in God or does God exist, the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Then from there, you can get into some Christian theology, and man's place in the world and things like that. It's just giving a defense for your worldview.Brian:    Maybe I should ask about this first, but do you work for Christian organization? Are you in the ministry in any type of formal way?AJ:    No. I work for a political consulting business.Brian:    Do you think Apologetics is something just for a certain type of person?AJ:    No. It's definitely useful for anybody especially Christians and especially in America, especially in the time we were there. Brian:    It's interesting. Sometimes I think we leave these type of topics to people who are pastors or in the ministry. In some ways, they need it less in their daily life than we do.AJ:    Right. I agree.Brian:    What purpose and effect has Apologetics had on your life?AJ:    It's definitely made me less anxious about entering into worldview conversations with people or social issue conversations or religious conversations with people. I'm confident that if I don't have good answers to people questions or good responses to people's questions or views or anything like that, that they at least exist. It’s gived me confidence. It certainly strengthen my faith. It's just kind of given me like a methodology to deal with problems or thoughts that I have or thoughts or things that I hear other people say or things that we read on the internet. I now have kind of like a method and a filter to digest those things and figure out, "Okay. What are they really saying here” and stuff like that.Brian:    What you've learned about Apologetics sounds like it has affected how you see the whole world, is that fair?AJ:    Sure.Brian:    How you listen to the news, how you kind of piece things together?AJ:    Mm-hmm (affirmative).Brian:    I think some people before they feel comfortable getting into a conversation, they want to know that they have all the answers.AJ:    Right.Brian:    But You just said, "I'm more comfortable in conversations even knowing that there will be somethings that I don't know." Could you talk about that a little?AJ:    When people start to say things from their worldview or start to make statements or start to ask me questions about how that relates to Christianity, I'm comfortable saying, "I don't know." Then, what I would start doing is asking them as many ques…