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, our first reading in our gospel for this weekend have a

special resonance for our time, I think, because they both speak clearly about

life after death. Now, I say it has resonance for our time because there's coming

more, more to be a dominant secularist or materialist ideology that says all

there is is the world that we can see and measure empirically. All there is is

matter and motion. Big bang happened. The world came into being. Eventually it

will pass out of being. We live for a very short time and then we die and our bodies

go back into the earth. The universe itself will wind down. I mean that's the

materialist, secularist view of the world. It might surprise you to hear this.

It's a surprise a lot of religious people, but the view that there is nothing

after this life for us was actually commonly held throughout much of the

Old Testament period. You look at the text of the Old Testament, you'll find

some that begin to make a sort of tentative reference of an after life or

toward life after death. But a lot of the Old Testament, the view, the standard

view was, you know, that death is the end and we just we go back into the

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