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

director at Word on Fire. Today we are excited to share Bishop Bairn's presentation for

the prestigious Albert Cardinal Meyer Lecture Series, which is hosted each year at MundoLine

Seminary right outside of Chicago. Bishop was invited to give the 2022 Lecture Series,

and he did so back on March 10th of this year. The title of his first talk was Breaking Through

the Buffered Self, and in this talk he looked at the matrix that made the army of the

disaffiliated possible, namely what Charles Taylor calls the culture of the Buffered Self,

which is the ego cut off from any living contact with the transcendent. But then Bishop Bairn

uses the three great transcendentals. We talk about them all the time here on the podcast,

the good, the true, and the beautiful. He uses those as his framework, proposing ways to break

through the Buffered Self, and to help people open their restless hearts to a consideration of God

and the things of God. It's a high level somewhat academic talk, but I think you'll really enjoy it.

It's about an hour long, and then in a couple episodes we'll share the second part of the talk,

part two, which focuses mostly on the good and the beautiful. So in this talk he introduces the

topic and the framework, focuses on the true, but then in talk number two he'll look at the good

and the beautiful. So sit back and enjoy Bishop Bairn's Cardinal Meyer Lecture titled Breaking

Through the Buffered Self. Enjoy.

As both the father John and Matt Levereign have stated, by the way may I say too that one of my

proudest accomplishments as a director was getting Matthew Levereign to this faculty, so I was

delighted to hear that introduction. But it both stated pretty clearly, it means the world to me

to be back here. I spend a lot of my adult life in this place. I started as a student here when I was

22 years old and taught for all those years as a director here. And I've loved this place from

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