Quotes About Author

The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.

If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God!

The hope is that science gives us objective truth; religion, however, gives us personal meaning or personal truth. They should not be seen as contraries.

If people are to develop any deep spirituality today, and especially if men are to develop spiritually, they need to be liberated from self-serving worldviews.

They've gotten so used to these gatherings not being meaningful that they no longer know how to allow them to touch their heart or change their mind. The Holy Spirit is again the Missing Person of the Blessed Trinity.

Without meaning we are surely less than human and deeply discontented. Most meaning is largely preconceptual and not subject to words, and in that sense it is nonrational, but meaning lies in wait to appear and grab onto the right symbol in the right moment.

God's grace cannot be a random problem solver doled out to the few and the virtuous—or it is hardly grace at all!

Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from these addictions and from cultural lies. If the universal addiction is to our own

Mere obedience is far too often a detour around actual love. Obedience is usually about cleaning up, love is about waking up.

Do a violent people want, create and need a violent God, or has the textual presentation of a sometimes violent God legitimated and even blessed our own violent history?

If my underlying thesis in this book is true and Christ is a word for the Big Story Line of history, then the incarnational worldview held maturely is precisely the Good News!

The common word for this inner abiding place of the Spirit, which is also a place of longing, has usually been the word soul. We have our soul already—we do not "get" it by any purification process

We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone.

Creation is the first and probably the final Bible, Incarnation is already Redemption, Christmas is already Easter, and Jesus is already Christ.

In this instance, she understood completely what the endorsement of a fool was worth.

I hear you don't write any more, he says... Not true, I inform him. You should see the margins of my student papers. Not the same as writing a book though, right? Almost identical, I assure him. Both go largely unread.

books by her favorite "Golden Age" British mystery writers—Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie—evil

They might have been interesting if the people beneath had done the writing, but the living had nothing worthwhile to say about the dead.

She held the robe together with both hands—there was so much to cover that it took both hands—and stepped aside as I walked

cat in A Christmas Carol, and peering

I lit a cigarette and said to Feldspen, "That sounds to me like the biggest extortion this side of the Federal Income Tax. Are you sure the guy was serious?

I'm beginning to regret that suitcase, he said. I admit it freely. Money is a burden. I may write a monograph on the subject.

San Luis Potosí. The ruby in the forehead of Old May-hee-co.

chivalry' (a word deriving from horsemanship) had few of the connotations we attach to it today. Like notions of 'honour' – usually a peevishly dangerous self-esteem