WOF 380: The Evangelical Power of Beauty
The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
Brandon Vogt
4.9 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2023
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
In his keynote talk at the 2022 Good News Conference, Bishop Barron speaks on the evangelical power of beauty in the Catholic tradition. True beauty leads by steady steps to the ultimate source of beauty, Christ.
To evangelize, we can show the Sistine Chapel or Chartres Cathedral; show someone how to read Brideshead Revisited, the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or the poetry of T.S. Eliot; listen to Beethoven’s “Seventh Symphony.” This great tradition of beauty has the power to draw people in.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vaat, the host and the senior publishing |
| 0:11.0 | director at Word on Fire. And his keynote talk for the 2022 Good News Conference, Bishop |
| 0:17.8 | Barron spoke on the evangelical power of beauty in the Catholic tradition. True beauty |
| 0:24.5 | leads by steady steps if we allow its power to work on us and leads us to the ultimate |
| 0:30.9 | source of beauty which is God Himself. You can show the Sistine Chapel or Shart Cathedral. |
| 0:37.5 | You can unveil Brideshead Revisited or the stories of Flannery O'Connor or the poetry |
| 0:42.7 | of T.S. Eliot. You can listen to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and much more. Show the great |
| 0:48.8 | tradition of beauty. Bishop Barron encourages which is not threatening but draws people in. |
| 0:54.5 | So sit back and enjoy this keynote talk from Bishop Barron on the evangelical power of beauty. |
| 1:07.1 | Most of my life, you know, I've been focused on the Word as a student, as a teacher, as a writer, |
| 1:13.3 | as an evangelist. A lot of my life's been about the spoken word, the written word and the |
| 1:18.1 | Catholic tradition. Reference is the Word, obviously, the Word of God and the words of all the great |
| 1:23.2 | thinkers and poets and theologians and all of that. But we also have reverenced the beautiful. |
| 1:31.3 | And the beautiful is a means of evangelization. I think it's very important that we claim that |
| 1:38.8 | part of our tradition. I've railed against, as you know, a dumb-down Catholicism. I hate it because |
| 1:45.7 | we're smart religion and we dumbed ourselves down. No one told us we had to do it but we did it |
| 1:51.1 | and it's been a pastoral disaster. But we also aglified our tradition. We dropped a lot of the |
| 1:57.5 | beauty of our tradition and decided somehow that, you know, just flattening things out would be |
| 2:03.1 | more appealing. Well, on the contrary, we should reclaim the beauty of our tradition. So, |
| 2:08.9 | delighted that that's our topic for today. Can I start? I think Devon is running the slides. |
| 2:21.2 | I'd be hopeless. I've tried to do this before I give a talk and there we go. He knows how to do it. |
| 2:26.1 | I'm beginning with this figure depicted appropriately on an icon. That's St. John of Damascus. |
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