The Strangest Way: Walking the Christian Path

by Robert Barron

Overview

In the modern world, Christianity has come to be seen by many as an unintellectual, uninspiring, and unthreatening worldview. But the classical tradition of mystics and scholars reveals something quite different: the most engaging, surprising, and strange of all the religious paths. 

The Strangest Way: Walking the Christian Path is an instructive guide through the breathtaking reality of what it means to be a Christian. Bishop Barron not only lays out his famous three paths to holiness—finding the center, knowing you’re a sinner, and realizing your life is not about you—but also concretizes them with practical actions. Drawing on both literary and spiritual masters, Bishop Barron invites readers to intimacy with God through imitation of his own self-gift in Christ. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943243839
Publisher:	Word on Fire
Publication date:	07/12/2021
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.92(d)

About the Author

Bishop Robert Barron is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and the host of CATHOLICISM, a groundbreaking, award-winning documentary about the Catholic faith. On July 21, 2015, Pope Francis announced his appointment as Auxiliary Bishop in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and on June 2, 2022, he appointed Bishop Barron the ninth bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester (Minnesota). Ordained in 1986 in the Archdiocese of Chicago, Bishop Barron received a master’s degree in philosophy from The Catholic University of America in 1982 and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Institut Catholique de Paris in 1992. 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface Strange Christianity 1

Introduction Paths and Practices 7

Chapter 1 Walking the First Path: Finding the Center 29

Chapter 2 Walking the Second Path: Knowing You're a Sinner 71

Chapter 3 Walking the Third Path: Realizing Your Life Is Not About You 125

Concluding Meditation The Strangest Way 183

Bibliography 188

Index 195

Editorial Reviews

What a wonderful book! Drawing on a wide variety of sources, theological and literary, Robert Barron helps us find a way through the darkness of our imaginations. What a gift!” 

Stanley Hauerwas

Bishop Barron has the rare talent of making ancient, timeless truths applicable to our twenty-first-century worldview, then taking that worldview and helping us reshape it into the mold of that immutable wisdom. As a convert from a lifetime of being Protestant, I appreciate his winsome ways of leading us to beauty, then goodness, and finally truth. These were no small stepping stones on my journey to a deeper faith. And this is what he does with The Strangest Way, reminding us that the hope of Christ is hope for the whole world, even though it’s so antithetical to our culture steeped in modernism; in fact, this is precisely why it’s the hope. We urgently need this message more than ever.” 

Tsh Oxenreider

Bishop Barron once again shows that he has a special gift for revealing the general and complex truths of philosophy and theology in the vitality and color of the particular: through art, through the lives of exemplary Christians, and in our everyday experiences. This book is a timely reminder that Christianity is not beige, bland, or reflective of the status quo, but strange, mysterious, beautiful, and profoundly life-altering. More importantly, Barron urges us here not just simply to have orthodoxy (right belief), but orthopraxy (right practice)—and he is helpfully specific about the practices we need to adopt in order to walk the strange path of Christianity with more purpose, direction, and attention.” 

Jennifer A. Frey