Category: Word on Fire

On
Fr. Robert Barron

Cosmos and the tired myth

Seth MacFarlane, well known atheist and cartoonist, is the executive producer of the remake of Cosmos, a television series which recently made its national debut.

The first episode featured, along with the science, an animated feature about the 16th century Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake by Church officials. A statue of Bruno stands today in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome on the spot where he was put to death.

In MacFarlane’s cartoon, Bruno is portrayed as a hero of modern science, and Church officials are, without exception, depicted as wild-eyed fanatics and unthinking dogmatists.

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Fr. Robert Barron

Why goodness depends on God

One of the most common observations made by opponents of religion is that we don’t need God in order to have a coherent and integral morality.

Atheists and agnostics are extremely sensitive to the charge that the rejection of God will conduce automatically to moral chaos. Consequently, they argue that a robust sense of ethics can be grounded in the consensus of the human community over time or in the intuitions and sensibilities of decent people, etc.

What I would like to do is lay out, in very brief compass, the Catholic understanding of the relationship between morality and the existence of God and to show, thereby, why it is indispensably important for a society that wishes to maintain its moral integrity to maintain, at the same time, a vibrant belief in God.

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Fr. Robert Barron

What is our fundamental problem?

Word on Fire column by Fr. Robert Barron

The first reading for Mass on the first Sunday of Lent this year, taken from Genesis 3, deals with the creation of human beings and their subsequent fall from friendship with God.

Like a baseball coach who compels even his veterans to re-learn the basics of the game every spring, the Church invites us, during the spring training of Lent, to re-visit the spiritual fundamentals. And they are on no clearer display than in this great archetypal story.

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Fr. Robert Barron

‘Priest, prophet, and king’

Word on Fire column by Fr. Robert Barron

Editor’s note: This week we begin publishing the column “Word on Fire” by Fr. Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire Ministries, which reaches millions of people by utilizing the tools of new media to draw people into or back to the Catholic Faith. Father Barron is the creator and host of Catholicism, a groundbreaking, award winning documentary series about the Catholic faith. The series has aired across the country on PBS and EWTN and has been seen and broadcast in parishes, universities, schools, and media outlets throughout the world. The documentary received a Christopher Award for excellence. Father Barron and Word on Fire also released the documentary Catholicism: The New Evangelization in 2013.

A classic characterization of Jesus is that he is priest, prophet, and king. As priest, he sanctifies, that is to say, he reestablishes the lost link between divinity and humanity; as prophet, he speaks and embodies the divine truth; and as king, he leads us on the right path, giving guidance to the human project.

You might say that, as priest, he is the life; as prophet, he is the truth; and as king he is the way.

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Bishop Robert Barron

The disorienting quality of real prayer

Editor’s note: Because of its length, this column by Bishop Robert Barron will be published in a two-part series.

One of the most impressive literary figures of the 20th century was the Irish writer Iris Murdoch. You may have heard of her surprising and thoughtful novels such as A Severed Head and The Good Apprentice; or perhaps you are conversant with her more abstract philosophical texts such as The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

She reached her greatest notoriety, posthumously, in the work of her husband John Bayley, who penned a moving memoir of his wife’s slow and emotionally wrenching descent into Alzheimer’s disease. To hear the story of one of the brightest women of her time gradually losing her mind is, to say the least, unnerving. But due to Bayley’s artful telling, the experience becomes, almost despite itself, uplifting as well.

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