part of the humor of living on this backward planet is listening to the hominids rationalize their predations.
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am. " We are ontological oxymorons.
If the churches ever did reunite, it would have to be into something that was as sacramental and liturgical and authoritative as the Roman Catholic Church and as protesting against abuses and as much focused on the individual in his direct relationship with Christ as the Evangelicals, as charismatic as the Pentecostals, as missionary-minded as the old mainline denominations, as focused on holiness as the Methodists or the Quakers, as committed to the social aspects of the Gospel as the social activists, as Biblical as fundamentalists, and as mystical as the Eastern Orthodox.
How will the Tower of Babel be undone? How will we understand each other in Heaven? Will we all speak English or Dutch or Latin? No, we will speak music.
No one justifies lying, cheating, betraying, promise breaking, devastating and harming strangers. But we expect and we tolerate doing this to the one person in the world we promised most seriously to be faithful to forever: we justify divorce.
In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw “the heavens. " In an age of hopelessness they call it simply “space.
Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.
If we continue on the path we're on, there simply won't be enough fresh water for everyone.
What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.
Riches begin in the form of thought.
A lot of my work is about questioning the stability and permanence of architecture, and, in turn, the stability of society.