#theology

"The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son."

"Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts."

"Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice"people, not heroes."

"The rich fop Francis of Assisi was bored all his life―until he fell in love with Christ and gave all his stuff away and became the troubadour of Lady Poverty."

"By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer's icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it."

"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it."

"There is no knowing that does not begin with knowing God."

"If your doctrine changed for the better yet your character changed for the worse, you changed for the worse."

"You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle."

"If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic."

"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now."

"Like when you sit in front of a fire in winter — you are just there in front of the fire. You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you."

"Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God."

"Not bad, not bad at all,"Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."

"Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him"

"If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction."

"The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man's head because she turns his heart."

"He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion."

"There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found."

"Suffering provides the gym equipment on which my faith can be exercised."