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. Aveluia, Aveluia.

Happy Easter to everybody. You know just a few weeks ago I was in London giving a

series of talks and I had a public conversation with the popular historian Tom

Holland. Tom Holland's written a number of books about the Roman Empire

especially but he wrote a book a few years ago highly recommended to you.

Called Dominion and what he does in this book is he tries to show how

decisively influential Christianity has been in the shaping of our Western

culture that many of the values we take for granted you know individual human

rights care for the poor and the marginalized and this sort of thing are not

general values in fact he would say they weren't held in the Roman Empire at all

on the contrary. So why do we hold them? Well it's the influence he said of

Christianity. These aren't universal moral truths. They came from this very peculiar

and strange religion. That's why he said when we had our public conversation I think

someone from the crowd asked him what should we do what's the call of our time

and he said let Christianity be weird. I like that especially when I was coming

of age there was a tendency to reduce Christianity to a vague mysticism or

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