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 an 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 Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, for the coming year I want to do something a little

bit different. I've decided that maybe not exclusively but for the most part I'm

going to focus on the Old Testament readings for each week. I think you know

we Catholics especially we're pretty well aware of the gospel but the church

always juxtaposes the gospel with an Old Testament passage and I'm just

convinced very often we don't have a clear sense of what that's all about.

So again I'm not going to be completely exclusive about it but I think I'll

focus a lot this year on the Old Testament. So let's start now with the beginning

of the calendar year as we're beginning this part of the church year just

after the Christmas season. I'm going to focus on this extraordinary passage from

the book of the prophet Isaiah. How often by the way we read from the prophet

Isaiah? My next suggest to my listeners if you want to start with an Old Testament

book maybe start with Isaiah we read it a lot liturgically in different parts of

the year but this passage today reveals a central dynamic of all the biblical

revelation and indeed I think of the spirituality of every Christian. So let's

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