This last spring, I was commissioned an essay by Bishop Barron's Word on Fire journal,

which comes out quarterly, and they were putting out an issue on faith and film,

so they asked me to write an essay for it.

I asked them if I could read the essay for you, and they said that it would be fine,

and so I'm going to read this essay because I think I was really

able to concisely put together my vision of how culture can be healed or how we can integrate

healthy culture. And as we just saw in the last few weeks, we saw Jordan Peterson reappear.

We were happy to see that he seems to be doing a little better.

And so it's also an opportunity for me to frame my relationship with him in terms of thought.

What are the similarities and especially what are the differences that separate Jordan and I in our perception of how to engage, to heal, to deal with a difficulty in modern culture.

This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world.

The world is suddenly keen on storytelling.

After a few decades of the new atheist assault, of the postmodern undermining and fragmentation

of identities, of the venomous insistence that all that makes us human is a social construct

as opposed to the objectivity of the sciences, a strange post-Atheistic professor

from Toronto has shaken the core of secularist discourse. Of course, there are those Bishop

Barron among them who have been hacking at the question of narrative for a while. But as I stood

there at a Toronto bus station late one evening in the fall of

2016, I knew that the moment and the character I was facing were different. After a goodbye hug and a

pause, I looked at Jordan Peterson and said, you're going to bring back Christianity. His surprised reaction betrayed hesitation, followed by his

secular alternative. Hopefully we can get people to understand the psychological significance of

these Bible stories. I was unsettled by his answer, and it still rings in my ear to this day.

...