If I were dialoguing only with people with whom I completely agreed in every detail, I'd be dialoguing with Jesus and his blessed mother.

You know what I mean?

Everybody under the sun, in the ancient world, medieval world, modern world today, everybody is a mix of good and bad.

They say good things, they say bad things, they do good things, they do bad things.

And so it's just wrong headed, it's just stupid to put people in these either or categories.

Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Vat, the senior content director here at Word on Fire and joining us from our newly renovated Santa Barbara studio is Bishop Robert Barron.

Bishop Barron, good to see you in this new place.

Yeah, hi Brandon, it's terrific. It's a bigger space for us and it's wonderful. I've been watching this whole process the last couple of weeks as they set it up and it's been tremendous to see but we're ready to go.

We'll say more about the new studio as it continues to be built out over the coming weeks here.

But today we're going to be talking about the problem of guilt by association.

We're going to learn how to escape the idea that people are either 100% bad or 100% good and we're going to look at how Jesus interacted with some of the tax collector centers, prostitutes and critics of his own day.

But before we get into that, Bishop, how about an update on a new and exciting thing happening there in Santa Barbara and just a, I guess a couple of weeks here at the time we're recording this, you're going to be welcoming a prestigious guest for another one of your Bishop Barron present.

Tell us who it is and what you'll be talking about.

Yes, James Lindsay here wrote this book. It's called cynical theories. He has the word critical crossed out and cynical put in this place.

And it's about this whole thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is the woke culture, the cancel culture, the intersectionality, all this business that is coming up out of critical theory.

So we'll explore all that. I think it's a really dangerous dynamic in our culture and in our church. And I appreciate it as book. I don't think he and I agree on everything. I think he's anti religious as far as I can tell.

But we agree, I think, on a lot of the themes around the woke business. So look at forward to that conversation, which we'll have, I think, here in our new studio space.

So we'll be recording that in mid December and it should be really shortly thereafter. So I'll be sure to update all the podcast listeners when that's ready to go.

All right, Bishop, let's talk about this guilt by association. And in some ways it ties into what you just discussed regarding James Lindsay's work with the cancel culture that there seems to be a growing sentiment both within the church and in the general culture.

That if you share a public conversation with someone or if you say something nice about one particular aspect of somebody's work, then you're endorsing everything that they've ever created or ever said or every behavior they've ever exhibited.

What's wrong with this basic assumption? And why is it so dangerous?

Well, there's plenty wrong with it. I mean, one is it's stupid. What I mean by that is simply, you know, if if I were dialoguing only with people with whom I completely agreed in every detail, I'd be dialoguing with Jesus and his blessed mother.

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