Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I am Brandon Vott. I am the host and the content director here at Word on Fire and joining us from Santa Barbara, California is Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron. Good to talk with you.

Hey Brandon, always good to see you.

Hey, I want to, you and I haven't really talked about this, but yesterday there was a big conference here in Orlando's the International Podcast Movement Conference.

It was all about podcasts. So I went to it and thousands of people, hundreds of booths, it was this massive thing.

And so I'm walking around there as, you know, a little representative of this Catholic podcast, but it was such an encouraging experience because there were so many people with such niche podcasts that, you know, have 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 viewers.

And it confirmed to me the potential and the scope of a show like this that, you know, TV and radio and even other forms of new media are great, but part of the limitation is that they require people to be at a specific place or a specific time or be on a specific platform.

But this format allows us to reach people when they're driving, when they're jogging, you know, wherever they are. So it was a great encouragement for me to go to that conference.

I'm glad. And you know, you convinced me and others too over the years that it is a really fruitful way to go. I think when I did the sermons, that's been a long time. I first heard the term podcast in connection with sermons.

And the same argument was used, you know, is that heck you can be jogging, you can be in your car, you can be exercising and listen to these things. So yeah, you know, let's do it.

I think we're up to like on your sermons podcast somewhere between 40 to 50,000 people a week download each homily. And so as I've told you, it's like it's like you sitting in a football arena preaching every Sunday, which again with fulltonsheen in mind. I mean, what would he have given to have that sort of pulpit.

Billy Graham, you know, even Billy Graham probably wasn't preachy to a stadium that big every single week every week.

Okay, well, today we are going to do something we do sporadically. It's another Q&A with Bishop Aaron, but this one has an interesting twist because it's an international Q&A. We're only taking questions from people outside of the United States. We've got people from nearly every continent.

And still waiting on that in article, call her to send in a question for us. So if you were in an article, we'd love to hear from you. But let's dive in. The first one is from Emmanuel. He lives in Mumbai, India. Here's this question.

Hi, Bishop Aaron. My name is Emmanuel, and I'm calling from Mumbai, India. My question is this. Do you believe it will be possible in the future of lower one's consciousness onto a computer and achieve digital immortality?

But if we ask, what would that mean for the Catholic Church and its theology? Thank you.

Well, that's an interesting speculative sort of question. You know, I guess from a scientific standpoint, I don't know who knows what might be possible at some stage.

Would that be immortality as the church understands it? Certainly not. So first of all, it's operating within a kind of platonic framework whereby who I really am is my consciousness or my inner self or my mind.

And then the body is more or less extraneous. And so just abstract the mind from the body, put it in a different sort of corporal space, and then you're good.

And of course, that's not what the church means in its anthropology. And it's not what we mean by salvation as those salvation is a matter of extracting the mind or the consciousness from the body and then, and then, you know, reincarnating at someplace else.

Rather, it's the transformation elevation, transfiguration of the entire self body and soul.

As we record these words today, Brandon, it's the feast of the assumption of a blessed mother. And I know for some people that can sound very fantastic, this idea of Mary being assumed body and soul.

But that's what it means, what I'm driving it.

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