What Is Beauty? w/ Bishop Barron

Novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor once insisted, “You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” In her short stories, Katy Carl weaves tales of despair and hope, brokenness and healing, and all being captured in the glory and grit of the human condition. Many ask, “Where have the good writers gone?” Read Katy and you’ll find one of them. Join me and Katy Carl, author of Fragile Objects, her first short story collection, on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast.  Stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of the Evangelization & Culture Podcast biweekly on WordOnFire.org, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can get more content like this in the quarterly print journal of the Word on Fire Institute, Evangelization & Culture.

“Every human person seeks peace, spiritual peace within oneself and with others, and material peace through a social life of friendship, charity, and genuine justice. What is at the heart of this aspiration? What indeed is peace?” Join me and Fr. Thomas Joseph White as we discuss his new book Contemplation and the Cross on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast. Stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of the Evangelization & Culture Podcast biweekly on WordOnFire.org, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can get more content like this in the quarterly print journal of the Word on Fire Institute, Evangelization & Culture.

Millions of pages have been written seeking to answer one vexing question: How did Adolf Hitler happen? Was the Führer of the Third Reich an accident of history or a fearsome warning of what the future may hold? Join me and Timothy Ryback as we explore the cunning and the luck, the designs and the accidents that brought Hitler to power in Ryback’s captivating book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast. Stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of the Evangelization & Culture Podcast biweekly on WordOnFire.org, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can get more content like this in the quarterly print journal of the Word on Fire Institute, Evangelization & Culture.

The modern world tells us that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” And yet, the Catholic Church deems beauty a transcendental. Is beauty something predictable, ephemeral, and a simple matter of taste? Or is beauty surprising, enduring, and objectively indisputable? Join me and Bishop Robert Barron as we explore the burning question, “What is beauty?” on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast. Stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of the Evangelization & Culture Podcast biweekly on WordOnFire.org, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can get more content like this in the quarterly print journal of the Word on Fire Institute, Evangelization & Culture.

In his iconic Templeton lecture, Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn summarized the horrors of the twentieth century’s Communist experiment, saying, “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Join me and Ignat Solzhenitsyn as we explore his father’s heroic words and exquisite diagnosis of man’s plight without God in his book, We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast.  Stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of the Evangelization & Culture Podcast biweekly on WordOnFire.org, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can get more content like this in the quarterly print journal of the Word on Fire Institute, Evangelization & Culture.

In his autobiographical book, Derek Ruth explains, “During my time in heaven, Jesus gave me a choice, but I had no idea what the choice would entail. I believed I would come back to earth and continue living like I had been for the first twelve years of my life. I had no idea the trials and tribulations I would face in order to regain my life. And it has not been easy, but I would make the sale choice. I would choose this life.” Join me and Derek Ruth, with the help of his father Royce and his mother Jennifer, as we discuss The Eight-Minute Flight on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast.  Stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of the Evangelization & Culture Podcast biweekly on WordOnFire.org, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can get more content like this in the quarterly print journal of the Word on Fire Institute, Evangelization & Culture.

In his essay, “How the Great Truth Dawned,” Professor Gary Saul Morson muses, “Why is it, Solzhenitsyn asks, that Macbeth, Iago, and other Shakespearean evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses, while Lenin and Stalin did in millions? The answer is that Macbeth and Iago ‘had no ideology.’” Notwithstanding its rabid inhumanity, Professor Daniel Mahoney asserts, ideology always makes a brutal comeback. Join me and Daniel Mahoney as we explore his chilling and informative new book The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then & Now on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast.  Stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of the Evangelization & Culture Podcast biweekly on WordOnFire.org, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can get more content like this in the quarterly print journal of the Word on Fire Institute, Evangelization & Culture.

  As Matthew Becklo asserts, “The Catholic faith is full of paradoxes, but its greatest paradox is this: that all of its both/ands unleash this ultimate either/or, and all of its communion compels this unavoidable decision.” Are we with Christ or against him? And how do we balance the dynamic tensions (faith or reason, discipline or passion, spirit or flesh) that risk pulling us too far in one direction or another? Join me and Matthew Becklo as we consider his new book, The Way of Heaven & Earth: From Either/Or to the Catholic Both/And, on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast.  Stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of the Evangelization & Culture Podcast biweekly on WordOnFire.org, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can get more content like this in the quarterly print journal of the Word on Fire Institute, Evangelization & Culture.

What happens when a young man with an entrepreneurial heart and gifted piano-playing hands writes a letter to renowned public intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr. offering to play a concert for him out of gratitude? A lifelong friendship of shared musical appreciation and warm conversation begins. Join me and Lawrence Perelman as we unfold his unique and ennobling relationship with William F. Buckley, Jr. in his book American Impresario on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast.  Stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of the Evangelization & Culture Podcast biweekly on WordOnFire.org, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can get more content like this in the quarterly print journal of the Word on Fire Institute, Evangelization & Culture.

How are we to look at the world? Through a brilliant lens of hope, wonder, and gratitude? Or through a shadowy lens of despair, cynicism, and selfishness? The journalist, wit, and Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton is an extraordinary model who mastered the art of a marveling Catholic vision. Join me and Dr. Duncan Reyburn as we explore his excellent book, Seeing Things As They Are: G.K. Chesterton and the Drama of Meaning on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast.  Stay up-to-date with the latest episodes of the Evangelization & Culture Podcast biweekly on WordOnFire.org, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can get more content like this in the quarterly print journal of the Word on Fire Institute, Evangelization & Culture.