Quotes from Guy Consolmagno

Few of us have the power to heal broken legs, but we all have the power to forgive our neighbor. Yet how often do we do so?

In On the Incarnation Athanaseus explicitly states that creation is good, and that it is a path to lead us to God. He argues against those who assume creation is evil. And he brings forth the insight that by participating personally in His creation, God has elevated the status of nature. By implication, he maintains that the honor and duty of one who knows and loves God is to know and love His creation.

But I want more. I want reasons to have faith in my faith, to have a reasonable confidence that there is actually truth in what my religion teaches me about God and my relation to God. And that faith has to be based on something within myself that I already trust: it has to be consonant with my experience of the universe and my abilities to reason about that universe.

A Jesuit and a Franciscan are walking through a garden, silently engaged in prayer, when the Jesuit pulls out and lights up a big cigar. The Franciscan whispers, "My spiritual director says one should not smoke while one prays." The Jesuit replies, "Mine said it's all right if I pray while I smoke.")

true art, be it painting or novel or drama or music, selects and arranges.

Nothing within the universe itself can exist to explain the fact that it exists.

Is it easier to say, `Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, `Take up your pallet and walk'?" Ouch. Few of us have the power to heal broken legs, but we all have the power to forgive our neighbor. Yet how often do we do so?

Everyone has a religion, whether they admit it or not. For some it's Catholicism; for others, Vegetarianism or Elvis or Linux/Macintosh/Windows.

For what it's worth, in my experience astronomers are more likely than biologists to be believers. But several surveys, more scientific than my anecdotal experiences, have confirmed that in academic settings, the real atheists are to be found in English Literature departments.

he is able to appear inside locked rooms and come and go in ways an ordinary body could not do.

Beauty is worth looking for.

The whole of his argument centers on this fact; having established that creation can contain God, and show us the path to God, Athanasius now uses the statement that man is a part of creation to argue that the Incarnation is reasonable, that God can be present in the person of the man Jesus.

To put it another way, I am not trying to convince you; I am trying to convince myself.

Some fundamentalists have done their best to turn the term Christian into a dirty word, signifying all that is narrow-minded and bigoted and self-righteous. But then, a hundred years ago, the sloppy liberals at the other end of the philosophical spectrum tried to turn it into a formless generic term, where a "Christian" was anyone who had ever had an occasional urge to be a nice guy.

If there's one thing I hate about religion books, it's that arrogant attitude of smug satisfaction that we get when we think we've produced the ultimate answers to all the deep questions that have bothered the greatest thinkers of the ages. If the answers were so simple, those questions wouldn't still be with us.

Edwin tells us that he became an atheist in college; but as he grew to know the limits of science and then began seeing what he called "too many coincidences" in the universe, his atheism slipped to agnosticism. Then, he recalls, a professor showed him that you could find truth in poetry and once said to him that "an agnostic is an atheist with no courage." That clearly shook Edwin's easy agnosticism.