The human species – mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns – does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn’t trust...

If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it’s only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.

But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced....

As we passed under a streetlamp I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it . . . judging from the shadow,...

You can’t expect anyone to trust revelation if he hasn’t experienced it himself. Those who haven’t only know reason. And since revelation is a thing apart, and cannot be accounted for reasonably, they never will...

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from...