By Gary Topping–
My friend and fellow blogger George Pence recently turned me on to Bishop Robert Barron, whose “Word on Fire” ministry has made him an apostle of social media with an online presence greater, it is said, than any other Catholic but the Pope himself. No social media maven myself, I can at least attest that YouTube alone carries some 187 of his talks ranging from a few minutes to over an hour in length.
He is well worth listening to. He is well read, well educated, articulate and funny. A Chicago native, he was professor and rector of the Mundelein Seminary before being tapped to become one of the five auxiliary bishops of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles with responsibility for Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties.
One of my first encounters with him came through a YouTube interview he gave at the Amazon headquarters in Seattle regarding his 2018 book, Arguing About Religion: A Bishop Speaks at Facebook and Google. To my astonishment, he does not disparage such argumentation but instead encourages it. Arguing, he affirms, means that something is at stake; it is one way of taking life seriously. Of course argumentation needs to take place within a context of respect and civility, and since those are bywords here at TheBoyMonk, I thought this week I might summarize his case.
Argumentation, in his view, occupies a middle ground between two extreme ways of dealing with ideas with which we disagree. One is voluntarism, the violent imposition of our will upon our opponent. The other is toleration, which results in a sort of bland indifference to our opponent’s case. “I’m not interested in being tolerated,” Barron says; “I want to be engaged.”
So how do we effect such respectful and civil engagement? He suggests four ways, the inspiration for which he says he owes to the Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-84):
Be attentive. This means “surveying the entire territory,” carefully weighing each and every point of the argument.
Be intelligent. This means seeing patterns and hypotheses that might emerge as the argument progresses.
Be reasonable. This is fairly self-explanatory, but it basically means taking your opponent seriously and treating his argument with respect.
Be responsible. This, to my mind, is Barron’s (and Lonergan’s) best insight. It means to resist any temptation to “straw man” the opponent’s case, i.e., to misrepresent it in terms of its weakest elements, which can then be easily knocked over. Instead, he advises, try to “steel man” the opposing argument by emphasizing its strongest elements. This, he points out, was the approach of St. Thomas Aquinas (Barron is an unabashed Thomist), who always began by representing opposing points of view in the most persuasive terms possible.
I think Bishop Barron is onto something in presenting argumentation as a way of taking religion (and life itself) seriously. And he offers food for thought for those of us interested in the “New Evangelization,” finding creative ways of presenting the eternal message of the Gospel to our ever-changing culture.
