And what I'm going to do is talk about for maybe 10 minutes each, before I have questions and answers, you know, Q&A at the end.

About 10 minutes each on what I see is like some key places that modernity challenges any person who is religiously oriented,

and A4TRI challenges the Catholic person to think more deeply about the faith, but also where these four challenges that come from the modern era, which are, you might say, secular challenges, all also perhaps invite Catholic answers or resolutions.

So I want to begin with the first bullet point I have there on your handout, which is about Christo-centricity.

And I want to begin by just mentioning a gentleman who some of you may have read, and I hope all of you have heard of, that is to say, got hold Ephraim Lessing.

Lessing is one of the great figures of the German Enlightenment, whose life spans from something like the 1720s to the 1780s. So he's writing around the time of the advent of the American Revolution and then eventually French Revolution. And he wrote in 1779 a play that is called Nathan the Wise in which there's a dialogue

that he purposefully anachronistically puts back in the time of the third crusade in the high middle ages

between a rabbi or actually a Jewish interlocutor named Nathan,

a Muslim king, or a Muslim prince, I should say,

and a Templar Catholic crusader.

In the midst of this dialogue between the three,

there is a parable told, which is the famous parable of the rings.

And in the parable of the rings, there is a king. The king represents God. And the king wants to give

a precious ring to one of his three sons. He has three sons. The ring will promote the goodness

and welfare of humanity and will bring lasting truth to the human race.

But in his weakness and generosity, the king promises each of the sons who represent, you might have guessed, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to give them the true ring. So he has two rings fabricated that are

exact replicas or close to it such that no one knows which is the true ring and he gives the

three rings to the sons. The king then dies. The sons then become confused and quarrelsome among each other to figure out who has

the true ring. You're starting to get the idea. Who has received the true revelation

from the king that will bring prosperity to the world? There's even a rumor that there's a fourth

ring that was the true ring none of the sons got and they all have replicas so maybe none of us

got the true revelation in the end nathan says that the what is the way that the sons find resolution is to

...