Bishop Barron Address to members of Parliament

I've been keenly aware of the erosion of not only the historic churches but also, concurrently, the erosion of freedom of speech in Great Britain in recent years.  

Our cousins in the UK have never had the same robust safeguards to freedom of thought and expression that we enjoy here in the US, and recent years really have seen an erosion in these rights. 

Long before J.D. Vance recently upset the European establishment by pointing this out (for the UK and Germany and other places), I've been following with dismay as certain political and even religious speech - including silent prayer by Christians in certain locations - has been punished under the law, or else punished informally through police harassment.
  
Meanwhile, Muslim members of Parliament are overtly pushing to make "insulting Islam" a "hate crime" in the UK. 
I've been open in the past about my skepticism about criminalizing "hate speech" and my views have not changed on this point.  

I'm praying for a revival of Christianity in general and of classical Anglicanism in particular in the UK which, I trust, will also bring about a renewed respect for individual liberties.  Others may not have noticed this, but I believe it is no coincidence that the most religiously fervent country in Western Civilization (the US) is also the most robust defender personal freedoms and individual rights. 
These things go together. 

I'm glad to see that, while the bishops of the Church of England tilt at windmills, at least American Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron is trying to evangelize the culture.  Here are his remarks to a group including members of Parliament meeting at Westminster: 

Is Baptism Required for Holy Communion?

 This video is inviting Christians - especially Methodists and Episcopalians - to wrestle with that question and (I hope) see the value of the traditional requirement of baptism to receive the Eucharist.

Thoughts on Young Men becoming Eastern Orthodox

 Here is a video I posted back in December:

Secular Humanism has failed

 It has failed because it did not appreciate the inherently religious nature, nor the tragically fallen nature of Man; it did not have proper constraints and incentives for the human soul to flourish.

A society without God is a society in which we - following the primal pattern of the Fall in Genesis 3 - attempt to insert our self and our desires into the place of God.  And it simply doesn't work.

We in America and Europe now have a society in which people are giving up on marriage at alarming rates; where so few people are having children that the total human population is set to start declining for the first time EVER, where exceedingly few young adults say (when surveyed) that they would fight for their countries; in which loneliness has become epidemic; where there is confusion about such elementary realities as being created "male and female"; in which fraud and corruption in large institutions (and governments) are so commonplace as to be almost expected; in which there is little-to-no will to maintain the borders of Europe against large migrations of Middle Eastern and North African Muslims who (quite openly) aim at the Islamification of Europe; and on and on it goes.

There has been no "Star Trek"-like utopia since our societies began to secularize: only a crumbling of the foundations of everything.  

That's my take.  Here is that of author and philosopher Os Guinness: 

The Temptation of Jesus

Great discussion and insight-filled discussion of the Temptation of Christ in the wilderness with Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, Bishop Barron, and others.