Now what? What are you going to do now? What's going to feed your soul?

The liberal arts are about that. It seems to me.

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

director at Word on Fire. What are the liberal arts and why are so many schools and universities

getting rid of them? That's what we'll be discussing today with Bishop Robert Barron who joins us

from The Word on Fire Studio in Rochester, Minnesota. Bishop, good to see you as always.

Hey Brandon, how you doing? Doing well. Now you've recently visited one of the most prestigious

Catholic universities in the country, the University of Notre Dame. Why were you there? How'd your

visit go? Yeah, I was there as the second I think it was and I was invited by the student body

president and some others just to address the university community and they asked me generally

to talk about the nature of a Catholic university, this sort of classical issue and went down there

and I had mass at the Basilica and it was a very good crowd for that and I loved that church. I

was a student there many, many years ago. My first year of college before I went to seminary,

I was at Notre Dame. So I prayed in that chapel from the time I was what, you know, 19, 18 years old.

So I said mass and then I gave a talk. There was very well attended, a lot of enthusiasm

about the nature of a Catholic university and then we had a wonderful kind of Q&A session afterwards.

So it was a great joy. I loved it. I want to talk about a trend in schools, both high school and

the university level concerning the liberal arts, also sometimes called the humanities. There was

an article in the New Yorker that made the rounds last month. I saw it shared a disgust everywhere.

It was called the end of the English major and it revealed that during the past decade from roughly

2012 to 2022, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third

and many large schools have fallen even further. They gave a few examples. Humanities majors at

...