WOF 540: How the Virtues Help Us Respond to an Increasingly Vicious Online Culture

WOF 540: How the Virtues Help Us Respond to an Increasingly Vicious Online Culture

From The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture by Bishop Robert Barron

July 20, 2026 · 37 min · Episode 540

About this episode

The episode discusses how virtues can guide responses to the increasingly vicious online culture.

Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show . I'm Matthew Petrusek, senior director of the Word on Fire Institute and the host of the Word on Fire Show . Thank you for joining us. From Bishop Barron's very first social media post close to 20 years ago, he and Word on Fire as a whole have recognized that the online world is a rough-and-tumble place. While most, over the years, have interacted with our content with charity and respect, even if they disagree, there's always been a gallery of trolls who traffic in insults and profanity and are only interested in taking potshots at the ministry rather than engaging in conversation. So it goes—that's just part of the price of entry into the digital world, especially when evangelization is your goal. The internet culture, however, seems to have taken a dark turn recently. Whatever limited restraint people used to show in their online interactions seems to have evaporated in a toxic cloud of mob-fueling—and mob-fueled—rage, replete with distortions, deceptions, and sometimes even explicit calls for violence. Exacerbated by the rise of the use of AI, bots, and anonymous accounts often based in foreign countries, it is increasingly difficult to…

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