If you say, I'm going to begin my consideration of the spiritual life with original sin, I would say, no.

No, we're off to a bad start. You don't begin with original sin. Begin rather with this marvelous original permission.

Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vat, the senior publishing director at Word on Fire.

Did you know that Eden was on a mountain? How should we understand the creation of Adam and Eve? And what actually happened at the fall?

Well, those are the questions we're going to discuss here in this episode, continuing our series on understanding Genesis.

And we're going to be discussing them with Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron, good to see you.

Hey Brandon, how you doing? I want to hear more about that cow you mentioned.

It's a little cow now on your territory. We've got a whole-steen cow on our little homestead here. She's only nine months.

We can't breed her and milk her until she's a couple years old, but those who know cows, she's a whole-steen breed, which is apparently the biggest milk producer.

And the person who sold it to us said, look, you got to be ready because she's going to be producing 12 to 17 gallons of milk a day when she's milking.

So our kids are going to be gorging on milk, I'm sure.

Well, and I suggest that you should make cheese. And then they send it out across the country.

There you go. Cheese, butter. Sure. Okay, well let's transition to your life.

You recently got back from New Orleans. You were there attending and celebrating the red mass. Tell us what that was about.

Yeah, it was fun. That's the second red mass I preached at. The red mass, you know, was a special mass usually in October for the legal community.

So for lawyers and judges and politicians, I did want a few years ago in Honolulu, which was at Delight.

And this year in the wonderful city of New Orleans. And I was in the cathedral there, the first time I'd visited the cathedral, beautiful place.

And the governor of Louisiana was there, the chief justice of the Supreme Court. I think most of the justices of the Supreme Court of Louisiana were there.

All sorts of, you know, federal and local judges and lawyers and law students, et cetera.

So we had a mass to ask God's intercession over their, or God's protection over their work.

But then I gave a somewhat substantive, homily, more like a little lecture on church, state, you know, politics, religion, that sort of thing.

And I invoked everybody from the author of the letter to Diagnitas from the second century, from the same time as Irenaeus by the way.

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