Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Bruno Barnhart podcasts


Episode 1 [4] | Episode 2 [5]
Drag both episodes into your iTunes library [6]

Our hunger for wisdom

Bruno Barnhart is a Camaldolese monk of New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, Calif. He is the author of The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center (Paulist, 1993) and Second Simplicity: The Inner Shape of Christianity (Paulist 1999), and co-editor of Purity of Heart and Contemplation: A Monastic Dialogue Between Christian and Asian Traditions (Continuum, 2001). His latest book is The Future of Wisdom: Toward a Rebirth of Sapiential Christianity (Continuum, 2007).

Episode 1: Sapiential hunger, hunger for wisdom (26 min.)
"A lot of people when they write about mysticism, they look at that experience as the end, the goal of the spiritual life," Fr. Barnhart tells Tom Fox. "But I think it is more like the beginning. You go from there. Something is put into you which takes the rest of your life to work it out, to express it, to incarnate it, to make it real in the world."

Episode 2: The paradox of wisdom (31 min.)
Look at First Corinthians, verse 1, Fr. Barnhart tells Tom Fox. "Usually you think of wisdom as a kind of fattening, by which we get larger and larger in our minds and we can bring more and more things together into a synthetic vision. But Paul seems to be talking about the opposite. He’s talking about falling into a black hole. That’s the paradox of Christian wisdom. All the wisdom disappears at a certain point, because we live in a world and an economy of faith. Wisdom seems to go on the drain on you. But it recovers when you need it. It is the wisdom of the cross."

No comments: