April Pastor's Points

Pastor's Points: God in the Culture

What a great joy it was for us to have Fr. Robert Barron at St. Thomas More on March 18th for our parish Lenten Retreat Day. Fr. Barron’s newest book, “Seeds of the Word: Finding God in the Culture,” had just come out that day or the day before and immediately sold out without Word on Fire even really advertising it. I saw a couple of lucky people who had copies of the book already and asked Fr. Barron to sign it. Perhaps they were on a special list to get the book early!

I ordered Seeds of the Word and read it during my post-Easter vacation. In this book, Fr. Barron comments on how we can find God—Seeds of the Word—present in many things that at first glance appear to be just relevant to the secular world. He covers everything from the films District 9; Eat, Pray Love; Moneyball; The Hunger Games; & Spiderman, to books such as The Hobbit and The Shack. Fr. Barron also comments on God in politics and various other topics from Alex Rodriguez to the BP Oil Leak to Bill Maher and his lack of understanding of faith and the bible.

I would highly recommend Seeds of the Word for your reading. The Church exists in the midst of the modern world. We don’t run from it. We exist so as the evangelize the world and the culture. Fr. Barron is fond of saying that the goal of Vatican II was not to modernize the Church but to Cristify the world. We all share in that ongoing task of Christfying the world by our faithful discipleship and proclamation of the Word. We have to take advantage of every opportunity provided to us to increase our knowledge of the faith so that we can adequately speak about the faith to others. So read more Catholic books and magazines. Study your faith. Talk to other people about your faith.

Fr. Barron has a ministry on You Tube where he comments on many of the topics covered in Seeds of the Word You can find those videos here: https://www.youtube.com/user/wordonfirevideo

You can order a copy of Seeds of the Word through the following links: http://www.wordonfire.org/resources/book/seeds-of-the-word-finding-god-in-the-culture/4683/
http://www.amazon.com/Seeds-Word-Finding-God-Culture/dp/0988524597/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429229938&sr=8-1&keywords=seeds+of+the+word

God’s blessing to you during this Easter Season.