Name one ancient culture that would believe in, you know, all you need is love, as John Lennon also said with the Beatles, and the Brotherhood of Man.

Those are Christian ideas, inescapably so.

So you can't say on the one hand,

imagine no religion, you know, no hell below us, above us only sky,

no no God, but boy, oh boy do we want the Brotherhood of Man.

You can't do that. That doesn't work. The Brotherhood of Man follows from the Fatherhood of

God.

And that's an old Christian idea. Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vott, the host and the

senior publishing director at Word on Fire. How did the so-called New

atheism rise so quickly in the early 2000s?

What made people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins so popular and effective?

And how did this new atheist movement decline and end almost as quickly

over the past few years? Those are the topics we'll be discussing today with

Bishop Robert Barron who joins us from Rochester, Minnesota.

Bishop, good to be with you.

Hey Brandon, good morning to you.

You recently rolled back in from Harvard of all places, one of the premier Ivy League institutions, what were you

doing there and how did it go? They invited me to do the opening of the year mass, the

Mass, the Holy Spirit for the Catholic community of Harvard.

And there's a gorgeous church there called St. Paul's,

which I'd heard about but never actually had seen.

Beautifully decorated church

...