“All my life I’ve heard spirited advocacy for the dialogue between the Church and the wider culture, but this call has come, almost exclusively, from the Church and not from the culture,” Fr. Robert Barron said in his talk entitled “From Correlation to Assimilation: A New Model for the Church-Culture Dialogue” given to the students and faculty of Christendom College on April 20. “It is this one-way quality of the conversation that is, I submit to you, problematic.”

Fr. Robert Barron, a prominent theologian and podcasting priest, is one of the world’s great and most innovative teachers of Catholicism. His global media ministry called Word on Fire has a simple but revolutionary mission—to evangelize the culture. His numerous books and essays serve as critical educational and inspirational tools for seminarians, priests, parishioners and young people worldwide.

Barron highlights problems within American culture as well its redeemable strengths. Problems which the Church encounters in communicating with American culture include an Hobbesian individualism, the notion of freedom as choice, and the privatization of religion.