WOF 232: The Cataclysm Sentence
The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
Brandon Vogt
4.9 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2020
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One day in 1961, the famous physicist Richard Feynman stepped in front of a Caltech lecture hall and posed this question to a group of undergraduate students: “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”
In today’s episode we apply that same thought experiment to some of the greatest thinkers and saints from our tradition. What one sentence would encapsulate their thought? We look at Moses, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Merton, and even Bishop Barron’s own “cataclysm sentence”!
A listener asks whether God made a mistake in creating humans.
Links
- Watch “Sacraments” film
- Radio Lab episode – “The Cataclysm Sentence”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Find the center, know your resciner, realize your life is not about you. |
| 0:13.6 | Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vot, the host and the content director here at Word on Fire, |
| 0:19.6 | Captain Ministries. Joining us in our Santa Barbara studio is Bishop Robert Aaron. Bishop Aaron, |
| 0:25.6 | always good to see you. Hey Brandon, good morning. Good afternoon. I guess to you in Orlando. Good afternoon. |
| 0:30.8 | I know we're always like we're always in the morning for you and the afternoon for me. |
| 0:34.6 | It's all so hard and 3,000 miles away. Yeah, besides the spatial difference. We just announced that |
| 0:41.2 | Word on Fire, the release of our new sacraments film and study program. This was something that you |
| 0:46.0 | filmed about a year ago, which ironically at the time the sacraments were freely and widely available. |
| 0:51.4 | Now they're not. We're still in the middle of this coronavirus thing. Talk to us a little bit about |
| 0:57.2 | this study program and why you think it's important for Catholics now to focus on the sacraments. |
| 1:02.3 | Well, you know, one thing is they don't need me to say so because what we did at Word on Fire is we |
| 1:06.4 | asked people in Paris Ministry. What would you like us to do for our next series? We've done |
| 1:12.8 | ones on the Eucharist, on the Mass, on God, etc. And the overwhelming response was something on the |
| 1:18.6 | sacraments, please. So we're just responding in a way to the demand of the audience. |
| 1:24.8 | But I think you're right. We didn't see the coronavirus thing coming and |
| 1:28.8 | people's hunger for the sacraments has been reawaken. So I think it's a it's a prime time really |
| 1:34.1 | for this to come out. I'm really proud of it. We filmed it down in Hollywood last, |
| 1:38.4 | whenever that was, October or something, in a beautiful church down there, appropriately called |
| 1:42.7 | Bluss' sacrament. And we got a big crowd in that church and I gave these selectures that were |
| 1:47.2 | filmed very beautifully. So I think it will be super useful to a lot of people in ministry and also to |
| 1:53.3 | you know, the average Catholic. Yeah, I thought of it for my own family with my own kids, you know, |
| 1:58.4 | some of the reflections might be a little bit above them, but the beauty of the film series will |
... |
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