Show Notes
The internet has handed the human race an old tool with a new edge: the power to form a mob in seconds, choose a scapegoat by lunchtime, and feel the sweet relief of expulsion before dinner. Jeremy sits down with one of the most consequential builders of modern Catholic media to ask what kind of spiritual force is actually moving through our feeds — and what it costs the people wielding it.
Jeremy is joined by Father Steve Grunow, the executive director of Word on Fire — the apostolate he has built alongside Bishop Robert Barron over the last 25 years into the preeminent Catholic media institution in the world. A priest of nearly three decades, a former competitive bodybuilder, and a media operator who has spent his entire career at the intersection of evangelism and technology, Fr. Steve brings both the pulpit and the boardroom to a conversation about the spiritual stakes of the internet age.
They get into: René Girard's scapegoating mechanism and why it has metastasized inside social media; the corrupting effect of influence on those who reach for it; the satanic logic of wielding dark forces like antisemitism for clicks; the 60-year civil war inside the Catholic Church and why it has weakened the Church's immune system; the uniquely American ecumenical alliance between Catholics, Jews, and evangelical Protestants and why it is now under threat; the grotesquerie of weaponized “Christ is King” content; the rise of Catholic LARPing and a new Pharisaism online; the cultural revolution of 2016 as a false-prophet moment, with Wokism on its tripod of racialism, queer identitarianism, and sex-war feminism; the wave of young men flooding back into the Catholic Church; the bodybuilder priest and what the gym taught him about evangelism; and finally the triumph of the Lamb.
00:00 Are We Living in an Antichrist Moment?
00:48 Is Media a Tool for Evangelism?
03:29 René Girard, Scapegoating, and the Online Mob
09:00 The Roman Roads, the Gospel, and the Devil Watching
16:59 Two Kingdoms, Two Banners
31:26 Influence, Ego, and the Corrosion of Power
39:39 Wielding Dark Spiritual Forces — Antisemitism for Clicks
43:41 The Catholic Civil War and America's Ecumenical Exception
53:45 Saved by “The Wrong Blood”
1:00:20 What Beauty Really Is — and Why It's Being Destroyed
1:17:07 Catholic LARPing and the “Christ Is King” Grotesquerie
1:38:19 The Revival, the False Prophet of 2016, and the Triumph of the Lamb
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