Friends, welcome to Word on Fire, Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated

to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every

continent and to facilitate and encounter with Christ and His Church. The efforts of

Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's Word where

it is most needed. Today we invite you to join Bishop Robert Baron as he preaches

the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this great feast day of epiphany and I would like

to take this opportunity to talk about a phenomenon that's very prevalent today, namely the

option for spirituality rather than the faith, this tension between spirituality and faith.

You can see it if you start looking almost everywhere. Look at the recent work of Eckhart

Tolla, the man whom Oprah strongly recommended. I think I spoke a few months ago about his

book. He sees the particular religions as divisive and finally unnecessary. What underlies

all of them is a basic set of spiritual convictions and intuitions. When we grasp and follow

them, we are spiritually awakened. And we don't fall victim to the arrogance of particular

traditions of revelation that claim to be absolute. We're spiritual rather than religious.

In fact, that's better for us. You might remember about oh twenty years ago, the comparative

mythologist Joseph Campbell gave a series of interviews to Bill Moyers and he made pretty

much the same argument. It's much better to follow this fundamental spiritual intuition

behind all the religions than to cling to any particular religion.

Versions of this theory can be found in the 19th century in the work of James Fraser,

wrote a book called The Golden Bow. Many humanists of the Renaissance make a similar argument.

I would say many people today, if they're religious at all, would rather be identified as

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