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P.S. I apologize profusely for not posting the three previous audience transcripts (Jan. 9/16/23) in a timely manner. I am determined to catch up before next Wednesday's general audience.
Frances Schaeffer once answered the cultural influence predominant in the West since about 1963, comparing attempts to escape or avoid it to remedial measures taken to avoid "a bad London fog."
One closes the door, latches the windows, to paraphrase, but the moisture and wet, cold humidity and its media favorable to the growth of mold and rot, manages to seep into the house regardless.
Too few pastors in the church prepare their charges for the onslaught, trying either to keep them apart from the "prevailing spirit of the age" or as kind of permanent spiritual kindergarteners.
Thank God Almighty, steeped as I was in that prevailing zeitgeist as a young man I managed to encounter some of the few who had made an honest attempt to articulate or to suggest the answers, not because the prevailing post-modernist language fails to recognize these issues but because so many Christian leaders seem unable or unwilling.
Clearly Pope Benedict XVI is not one of those afraid to grapple with the ghastly hubristic anti-philosophy that passes itself off as the world's wisdom in the West at this time.
There is not one issue considered "relevant" and worth discussion in the West or its imitators in the world today to which he shows any sign of intimidation.
We're all quite blessed to have him where he is, and may God in Christ continue to grant him strength and peace.
Thanks for doing this ELS. God bless you!