Every valuable creative idea must always be logical in hindsight. If it were not, we would never be able to see its value.
It's not always clear where a healthy patriotism shades into a dangerous nationalism.
Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.
Institutional Christianity has had clear secular benefits to American life for hundreds of years. It's played both a prophetic role in terms of generating moral critiques of American excesses, and so on, and also a communal role, in terms of building community as the country moved westward to the role my own Catholic Church played in assimilating generations of immigrants.
I read a lot of G. K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.
My mother converted when I was 16. She was the driving force behind religion in our family. So, I'm sure I was heavily influenced by that. But, I also was, and still am, convinced by the Catholic churches historical claims to represent the continuity with the early Church that other forms of Western Christianity lack.
Americans are an "almost chosen people," which is meant to suggest that there are clear parallels, literal, theological and everything else, between the American story and the Old Testament story of Israel and then the broader story of the Christian church. It's OK to recognize the parallels. It's OK to invoke them. But, you have to keep that "almost" in front of the "chosen. " You can't go all the way and say, "America is Israel, America is the Church. " That's where I think patriotism shades into, what I call, the heresy of nationalism.
Singing is basically a form of pleasant, controlled screaming.
The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.
Nobel prize-calibre geniuses often have certain core autistic features at their heart.
To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.