Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vot, the senior content director here at Word on Fire.

And we're glad to be picking up the thread that we started weaving a couple weeks ago when we shared the first half of Bishop Aaron's recent talk titled,

Notking Holes and the Buffered Self, approaches to the question of God. Bishop Aaron gave that talk at Kinric Glenin Seminary as part of their Kinric Lecture series.

And the first half of the talk focused on this concept of the Buffered Self, which gets its name from the work of Charles Taylor,

the Buffered Self refers to someone who is cut off from the transcendent, cut off from the supernatural. They've buffered themselves from everything beyond the material world.

How do we help someone escape this Buffered Self and how do we engage in the hard work of soul, doctrine, expanding their mind and soul to the possibility of God?

That's all what we covered in the first half of this talk from a couple of weeks ago.

But in the second half of the talk, we look at four different approaches to the question of God, four ways to help people escape from the Buffered Self.

We looked at the first one, the way of intelligibility at the tail end of last time's episode. But in this episode, we're going to look at the final three ways or approaches.

We have the way of contingency, the mystical way, and finally the moral way. These are all approaches to knock a hole or create a crack in the Buffered Self and help the light of God to pierce inside.

Before we get to the second half of the talk, though, I want to remind you one more time to pick up your copy of the new book, The Word on Fire Vatican II Collection.

It's one of the most exciting volumes I think we've ever released. It's a major book that includes the four most important texts from the second Vatican Council.

Vatican II contains 16 texts, but these four stand at the pinnacle as the major and most representative texts of all of the Council's documents.

But you don't just get these four texts by themselves. The Word on Fire Vatican II Collection surrounds those texts with commentary from Bishop Baron and the four post Vatican II popes.

Similar in style to the Word on Fire Bible, if you liked reading the Word on Fire Bible, you'll really enjoy reading this collection as well.

You can learn more and get your copy at wordonfire.org slash Vatican II.

We'll sit back and enjoy the second half of Bishop Baron's lecture on knocking holes in the Buffered Self. Enjoy.

Okay, now a second way. This first one, though, I find it helpful for young people today who are very taken by the sciences.

Second way, the way of contingency. A second rational approach to God, a second monoduxio, if you want, leading by the hand, commences with the radical contingency of the world.

By this technical philosophical term, I simply mean the ontologically evenessent quality of everything in our immediate experience.

The objects, animals, and people that surround us, the states of affairs that obtain the weather, the stars, the planets, all of these exist, but they don't have to exist.

One indication of this, and Thomas Aquinas picks up on it, is the simple fact that all of them came into being, and sooner or later will pass out of being.

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