Welcome back friend! I'll be praying for you, continue being a salt and leaven for others and your community!

Same here! I was an atheist (and at one point considered myself a satanist) until years of substance abuse brought me to a point of total desperation. I went to my first Mass still feeling the tremors of a heavy cocaine binge after a co-worker passed away due to her addiction. That particular day, a traveling choir visited the church and sang a capella at the entry way at one point during the service... hauntingly beautiful is the best way I can describe it... --it gave me chills. That was the first time I had truly felt anything in a very long time. I signed up for RCIA the very next day, eventually getting baptised and confirmed. Now I want to bring God to gaming.

That's Christ - you can run from Him as fast as you can, yet he'll wait at the darkest end of your way, with open arms. God bless you!

Thank god!

@@djweaverdev2961 Good. You are now again on a package trip with different group of addicts.... haaaaaaaaaaa....what impels you to be gregarious....why cannot you live your life for yourself setting your own goals and achieving them...for God's sake your are living in the Western World with its privileges and not on some thug infested corrupt developing world even where people do set goals that are against all odds and still achieve them....even landing up in the USA and turning out achievers. Do well.

Good on you mate!

Satan knows God but he hates him. If you admire Bishop Barrons knowledge, don’t you also love the things or the person that he’s talking about? 😉

Don’t be afraid, my friend. The Protestant obstinacy to portrait the 2000 years-old Catholic Church as a caricature is what makes them more competitive in a somewhat disputed market for faith. We don’t see that. Truth orders anything to It because Truth is indeed a person in relation to us: that Person didn’t write a book or ordered anyone to write one single line and asked anyone to interpret it, but He built (“oikodoméo” in Greek) a Church who wrote a book to live His name. May the Holy Spirit guide you. There is ONE Church. Outside of it, we have ecclesial communities and maybe Churches (dioceses) in schisms. I recommend you to go for books of Catholic apologetics that are charitable. Like Trent Horn’s and Jimmy Akin’s, for example. Greetins from a friend in 🇧🇷 Brazil.

Hope all worked out for you my friend!

Exactly

'Abandoning beauty and technical skill' - absolutely agree. Although you wouldn't want to say that 'out loud' as most likely it would be interpreted as you 'not understanding' the piece'. Seriously........the emperor has no clothes! Give me Renaissance any day of the week.

I think that the creative conveying of ideas sometimes is genius as in early dadaism or in piero Manzoni art works, but right now it's mostly appealing to the smugness of people that want to feel smart because they like pointless art and provocation, moreover since since the technical side is set apart many people take this route thinking it's easy.

It is like comparing rock to a bird, they both have a way of getting our attention to a different perspective, yet I will always appreciate the bird over the rock which never lived even though the bird dies. It is better to have lived and died than never to have lived. Yet, the rock endures, its structure being more closely ordered less dynamic. We can learn so much more about God from the bird though.

And his razor sharp delineation is remarkable. He dismantles a topic down to its pieces, and one by one he identifies the pieces, and finally assembles the whole thing. It makes you feel like you've gained a semester course in just one video.

I think it's the Protestant worldview that makes everyone, even athiests think that evangelism is the meaning of life. So there's so much at stake in all of their interactions. This coupled with hyperrationalism makes them aggressive.

Bro did we just become best friends?

Also, Bishop Barron, do you think "postsecularism" is a synthesis of some of the best parts of postmodernity with modernity? I see that as the next move.

@Richard; *Richard Rorty, nót Richard Rohr.

@@Sportinglogic No I meant Richard Rohr : )

Jordan Peterson is cringe

Jordan Peterson is cringe

I like Yin and Yang

Couldnt put it better

Sounds about right.

Minimum wage employees rebelling against their boss, except they think their boss is the supervisor who makes one dollar an hour more than they do (see: The russian revolution against the lower-middleclass Kulaks). They seem to have some idea that they're never going to get a raise, although that is of course because they hate the chain of command, and love the protections that keep them from being fired. It's all very sad- an entrenched lower class self-actualizing and propagating a self-oppressing culture. God is of course to blame for all this. The toddler falls and blames The Father for not swooping in, at once believing in The Father, and hating The Father. The Father says I AM, and the toddler says; No! And unbelievably, the toddler wins, the toddler wins the kingdom of hell. Every fall, and there will be many falls, every fall, as the toddler grows into a child, and then a man, is blamed on The Father. The Father _could_ save him, but never does. The forever-toddler seeks the Garden of Eden, seeks to crawl back up into the womb. Why does The Father not place the food directly in my mouth? Where is my diaper? That would be paradise. If someone would change my diaper. ~Post-modernism explained~

@@SpiritualFox In other words, the first step to freedom is learning to wipe your own ass. I know I'm being facetious, but if anything this highlights the necessity of the fourth Commandment. How are you going to grow up if you don't honour your parents?

@@ironymatt What is freedom? What are we escaping from? Responsibility? For what reason? To engage in hedonism and short-term pleasure seeking? I'm older than a lot of commenters around these parts, so i've already been there and done that, and woken up in strange places both hung over and high, so i understand to some degree the need to experience things, and not simply be a perpetual good-boy Christian child, as that is also regressive, however, post-modernism is essentially a hippie advocating for a Peterpan utopia. Prof. Jordan Peterson calls it a delayed play instinct. And he's right. I self-identify as a giraffe. Am i a genius philosopher from the 70's, or in grade school? The great Diversity that we worship today is a society-wide (1st World) fantasy. It's for women, and children, however, it's marxist underpinnings make it appeal to people under 30 as well. The post-modern aspects around identity bring in all sorts of disenfranchised people too. It's what Jesus promised, except you are Jesus, a very sorry average kind of person, and an atheist, Jesus, and you hate God, who has money, because he won't help the unfortunate prostitutes and thieves that live in Galilee. That's a bit harsh, but 'we' (western culture) do a disservice by detoothing Christ from Christianity, and replacing it with Lucifer's temptations, that we call freedom, by replacing an internal revolution with anarchy, while continually promising to plant more money trees. The world as we know it is a cocoon made for families, a place where women can raise children in peace. The reality of Capitalism, and the evil that exists in the hearts of men, _who are the ones holding up creation through their labour,_ is all pushed aside so TV can play a movie about Diversity and defeating a patriarchal white male who we know is evil because he smokes cigarettes. And they run it at 2PM because anyone with any ambition is in school or working. So yes. 😊 4th commandment. If your parents suck, we have _God The Father,_ and _Mary,_ as rolemodels (and you better believe that's a deliberate meme). Alternatively, drunk stepdad doesn't care what you do.

@@derek4412 Certainly, some of the whole truth is possible to discover. Is it majority or just a large part of it - I don't know. Some things are more obvious than others, thus easier to know. Thanks to God's Revelation in christian tradition oral and written - the things actually most important are possible to recognize, if one abandons personal prejudices. I'm not an agnostic, if that's what You thought.

@@Iwas11 Which ones would you recommend, for the present subject?

@@Iwas11 Question: Has anyone who has never prayed, and never taken a sacrament, never experienced the grace of God? I think there are direct and well-defined means of grace, certainly. I'm not convinced that list is exhaustive, though.

@@Iwas11 Reading Caritas in Veritate now, thanks for the recommendation. =)

@@Iwas11 The problem is, today's caves have WiFi.

Read St John Bosco's vision of the ship. Its influential. He was a dreamer like St Joseph.

@@misterprogressive8730 What is your 'truth' on postmodernism?

@@misterprogressive8730 Neither request for discussion or rhetoric. A simple question for 'your' concise definition. Considering you elevated yourself above the original author being incorrect. So you have have the soapbox, but left us wanting.

Absolute nothingness is of course the opposite to the genuine article. Not believing in God, post-modernists start from the premise of the impossibility of God. Post-modernism is hilariously unstable in that it's fully incapable of establishing a regular hierarchy of ideals. It's like the einstein-bose state of matter at absolute zero. It's mush, because the great equation that defines the laws of the universe, multiplied by zero, is zero. Step one: Abandon God Step two: Question all hierarchies of ideals (maybe this is step one?) Step three: Pull the rug out from under oneself Step four: Implode because there's no God left to blame for one's miserable state Step five: Begin worshipping Lucifer to make oneself feel better (by positing a greater evil than oneself)

@@elizabethkraszewski6603 *Warning: 18+ comment incoming.* Literal Satanism is just organized Christianity again. What i mean is that most people _believe in_ child molesters. The worst possible thing! (Lucifer, but it's not a fairy tale) Which is what The Father is. God is the devil. Now considering there's not many of them, or, at least, i'm not one, well- that makes me righteous. More righteous than a Catholic Priest. _A billion times more righteous._ Now just so long as we hate and try to destroy the Catholic Church, belief, The Father, and nuclear families- well, we're good people. That's a pretty long list though. Let's condense all the evil and call it organized morality. Just so long as we oppose all that's good, we're good. I mean, all that's conventionally good. This is a very complicated and complex belief system, only the most holy saints that have done hard time in jail know about this big brained wisdom. So can interest you in some Fascism? Or Maoism? How about some angsty atheism run by protestants? I'm just questioning the establishment. Is Bishop Barron a cannibal? What if Lucifer is actually Lord of this world??? Wait- that's Christianity again. Gerrr. I hate polite people in button up shirts! (Stage Five is a late stage, and isn't guaranteed. Most people seek personal gain, apriori, and thus, since it's most people, the evil of casual greed and narrow self-interest is more or less invisible, so this majority of people all get along with each other in our Utopian and rich 1st world society. It's only when the money runs out that Capitalism reveals itself to be a tribalistic post-protestant war of all against all. The ghetto i live in is already in an state of mild bedlam. It's an open air insane asylum, after dark.)

The Dark Ages partly applies to say the period of England between the end of the Roman Empire and the Saxon kingdoms. But it doesn't apply everywhere. The fall of the Western Roman Empire did lead to a Dark Age of a kind in parts of Europe. But not in e.g. Greece or Turkey

It seems inevitable that post-modernism will reject all meta-narratives, including Christianity. In doing so, it has to move forward somehow. We've seen it manifest in collectivism, communism, leftism, social justice, and most definitely atheism (with an emphasis on rejecting a masculine, patriarchal God such as that allegedly found in the Bible). Post-modernism then moves forward with its own meta-narrative. But if meta-narratives are back on the table, then so is Christianity. Instead of doing the hard intellectual work of comparing worldviews (like the atheist modernist academics still do, as well as academic Christians), this brand of post-modernism takes the anti-intellectual path of staying in its own echo-chamber, shutting down conversation, controlling speech, creating cancel culture, and policing thought by social influence. Whenever someone criticizes post-modernism for being self-refuting, the response is something like, "You are an idiot. You don't understand," just like the "obscurantisme terroriste" of the writing of Derrida as characterized by Foucault (en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault). The work of James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian exposed this brand of post-modern academia as intellectually bankrupt (/watch?v=xWhuQOVTFGw; /watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg). Offer no substance, or self-refuting substance, and then when called out on it, call your opponents idiots or bigots or just shut them down through threats. Pure anti-truth, pure self-refutation.

@@bds8715 you have a very interesting perspective, though I would disagree on the point that postmodernism necessarily rejects all meta-narratives, instead calling them into question. And it seems to me as though your eventual critiques of postmodernism (leftism and socialism and whatnot) are actually postmodernism attempting a return to modernism while still keeping the anarchic nature of postmodernism, which unfortunately is a self-destructive task philosophically speaking. The fundamental essence of Christianity is relationship, communion, and love, and these things are not bound to existence by any meta-narrative, rather they exist cross-culturally and are transformative and subversive. In fact, I would consider Christianity to be a universal subversive and transformative figure (i.e. one that exists regardless of philosophical structure and transforms them by interaction). Regardless, have a lovely rest of your day. God bless.

Well the thing is this incredulity or skepticism of meta narratives is an extremely useful tool, I’ll grant you that. But as a philosophy, it seems repugnant to truth. The definition of postmodernism alluded to epistemological skepticism. You can really tell this with Foucault’s instance on the epoch of knowledge. He called this episteme. You can never reach knowledge structures, all you have are maps of knowledge structures. This is why it’s so crucial to understand “The Archeology of Knowledge”. I think you are down playing the sophistication of the definition. Postmodernism is skeptical of ALL knowledge. ALL we have is human conversation. Foucault is also quite the Nietzschean. The assertion of the will to power is GREATER than truth. Power is the most fundamental level of episteme. You can kind of see where the issues develop here. Postmodernism is far more loaded than calling into question some questionable narratives. It calls into question ALL narratives. As Foucault would say, “I can’t find the historical justification for this.”

Also, to be fair, everyone in Marx’s time was a modernist. I would say however, since Marx is a Hegelian, that he’s in the realm of continental philosophy. It’s difficult to say a continental philosophy is exactly modernist. So I would say we should be careful in saying Marx is undoubtedly a modernist. I think Marx and Nietzsche aren’t exactly modernist and definitely helped Sartre and Foucault develop postmodernism.

I agree with you that Christianity "will gain a freshness and be a revelation". But for that to happen, there has to be change. +Barron references Newman's notion of doctrinal development and will no doubt pin his hopes on change in that sense. However, I think that change has to be more fundamental and probably entails a reversal of some positions that the Church has taken. Examples include gender issues such as chemical contraception ("every act of intercourse has to be open to the possibility of life"), homosexuals as intrinsically disordered, and women as incapable of imaging Christ. Non-gender related issues include the idea of an original sin as a once-off human act that takes place when humans exist in a state of prelapsarian bliss; the crucifixion as an event that somehow triggers something in the spiritual world so that humans can now escape from original sin, the various forms of atonement theology, etc. In these and so many other ways, the Church is talking passed the average modern person. (The overwhelming majority of practicing Catholics reject the official teaching on contraception.) It is not at all obvious to me that the modern person is wrong and the Church is right. I believe that the official Church has to humbly admit that it has gotten some things wrong. Even though there is no sign of Church officials are likely to take such a stance at this stage, I hope and pray that it will do so some time in the future. In fact, I believe that, because the Lord promised to be with us always, the official Church will eventually appropriately revise its teachings on such matters. Until it does, I believe the percentage of "nones" will continue to increase and many of good "liberal" theologians and Catholics who are committed to the Church's wellbeing will remain marginalised.

Anchor (Father), Form (Son) & Viens Oui! Oui! (Holy Spirit)

@@Ambrose_Heria Thanks for the response, Stephen. What you say is the standard "orthodox" response to each plea for the Church to change. I expect +Barron will take a similar approach. My concern, however, is that what counts as doctrine has drifted throughout the centuries. Some examples: If I rejected limbo when I was growing up (pre Vatican II) I would have been told that it is a "doctrine" and I have to believe it. Gradually, is doctrinal status was watered down and eventually eliminated under the claim that "doctrine" had not changed. The same holds for teachings with respect to slavery. (As late as the early 19th century, the pope owned slaves. Now slavery is regarded as a crime against humanity.) The same also holds for teachings with respect to levying of interest. The same now holds for teachings about the death penalty. Another example of what is regarded as "doctrine" by many conservatives is the idea that remarried divorcees should not receive communion. This is not a doctrine, but a discipline and practice, perhaps enshrined in cannon law, but easily changed at the stroke of a pen by the pope, should he wish to. The practice is designed to discourage divorce, to support the permanency of marriage, to ensure that the sacrament of the communion is not trivialised etc. Its aims might be noble, but there is an argument for eradicating / modifying the practice, if it no longer achieves its aims and does more harm than good. The prohibition of chemical contraception in marriage is generally assigned the status of a doctrine, but it is not really so. It is a teaching given by Paul VI in the encyclical, Humanae Vitae. The teaching is rejected by millions of married Catholics, often implicitly by simply ignoring it in practice, or explicitly. It does not pass Newman's "Sensus Fidelium" test. But what it does is divide the people of God into first and second class citizens --- those who fiercely defend it as doctrine, and those who do not, and often just leave the Church in exhasperation. I could go on and on, but at the end of the day we are left with a Church and hierarchy that has a largely self-referential approach to argumentation. It is unsurprising but sad that because of this, their teachings find little resonance in modern first world people, resulting in an unprecedented growth of "nones".

@Ernesto De Lilla I fear that you are correct, but I pray that you are wrong. For as long as the "gatekeepers" prevail, our children will grow into nones.

Jim Luebke yet life has become ever more disposable, at both ends of the age spectrum and in the middle too, especially when accident or disease strikes. As for those "in between ages" Holland and Belgium are examples of what happens when you extend euthanasia to those who "don't feel like living".

More than one programme I think! But yes please