Voted for Alasdair MacIntyre, John Lennox, William Lane Craig, and Bishop Barron. Probably should have voted for Alvin Plantinga also but somehow missed him.
I missed that Bishop Barron was on the list. I like him but I'm not crazy about the heavy apologetics focus in current American Catholic thought in general. I'm interested in reading his book of Vatican II commentary and seeing what I make of it.
To be honest I haven't paid a ton of attention to Bishop Barron. I've watched a few videos of his but it's not a major part of my thinking. But then again most of the people on this list aren't really either.
My first introduction to Bishop Barron was watching the
Catholicism series with a young adults group, and I honestly was not particularly impressed.
Last year, I was living in Los Angeles, and our parish priest gave the most vapid, hollow homilies imaginable, and it was absolutely draining to my faith life. When the churches all closed down due to COVID, I took the chance to watch mass online the try a few other masses from around the world, and I eventually tried Bishop Barron's mass from his parish in Santa Barbara. His homilies were so far and away better than any of the other ones I'd heard, so much so that I've been listening to him every week since March 2020. He's far more intelligent, thoughtful, and down-to-earth than I'd seen in my first impression of him.
A few things I really like about him: 1) he's very well versed in the Old Testament, Jewish history, salvation history, and textual analysis, meaning he can really dive into how the Old Testament illuminates the New Testament in a full and deep way, 2) he's very well versed on other philosophers and philosophies and can compare and contrast pretty effectively, 3) he's really taken the time to immerse himself in popular and millennial culture and understands it from the inside out in a way few priests and religious authorities ever do, and 4) with the one possible exception of his near-universalism, he's highly orthodox and politically in line with proper Church teaching.
I wouldn't say he's a "leading thinker" or something like that, but he's very gifted at articulating the faith in a very knowledgeable and yet still relatable way.
Poll
