#theology

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

"Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and – I shall boldly add – all can be theologians."

"The delight we take in our senses is an implicit desire to know the ultimate reason for things, the highest cause. The desire for wisdom that philosophy etymologically is is a desire for the highest or divine causes. Philosophy culminates in theology. All other knowledge contains the seeds of contemplation of the divine."

"To theology, ... only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred."

"Christ is the Lesson as well as the Teacher."

"The ultimate story of success: When a nobody, who has never once in his entire life known the feeling of being remembered or respected, suddenly snaps and becomes a world dictator. On one hand it sounds just, but on the other, it illustrates the reason why a prosperity message has and needs its limitations."

"And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?"

"When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying."

"Question the answers, I repeated every class. Reevaluate your conclusions when the evidence changes."

"Indeed, a quick glance around this broken world makes it painfully obvious that we don't need more arguments on behalf of God; we need more people who live as if they are in covenant with Unconditional Love, which is our best definition of God. (p. 21)"

"A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil."

"To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are."

"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing."

"Violence is spiritual junk food, and boredom is spiritual anorexia."

"It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine."

"It's not about whether or not someone is a bigot, but whether or not the argument which that someone is arguing is worth being a bigot about."

"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."

"For Christians . . . an unreflective faith is not possible if we take seriously the injunction to love God with the mind as well as the heart and soul."

"I wanted that future officer to weigh decisions with a supple mind and to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty."

"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."