Ask Fr. Barron: How to evangelize in a 30-sec sound-byte culture?

For this week, I asked Fr. Barron a question of my own. Lucky me!

Being somebody who works in "New Media" and likes studying the impacts of new technologies on culture and how we communicate, there are some unique challenges in sharing the Faith in this information age. One such problem is the scarcity of attention combined with an explosion of things demanding our attention.

Afterall, the amount of information available to us has increased orders of magnitude in recent years, yet we still have the same amount of time in a day. This means more things competing for our attention than ever before. It means we have more choices and temptations to consume information and the same amount of time to sort through it all.

This has naturally led to a bias toward information and ideas that are conveyed quickly and easily. Now, it's a very good thing to communicate truth concisely. Brevity, as they say, is the soul of wit.  And some of the most effective communicators in history were able to communicate profound truths in very few words or actions.

However, this trend has also led to people consuming a lot of info that is sensationalized, incomplete or over-simplified...which is not good. And it makes it harder for more complex ideas to be shared and understood.

Unfortunately, for the sake of this point anyway, there are many aspects of Catholicism that require a level of depth and lengthier study before somebody can really understand them. So I wanted to ask Fr. Barron what he thought were some ways to try and overcome these challenges of sharing an intellectually deep faith in a 30-second sound-byte culture.

Some great advice followed:

View the entirety of my Ask Fr. Barron series (so far) by clicking here.

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