God built lighthouses to see people through storms. Then he built storms to remind people to find lighthouses.

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons...

Why do you pray?” he asked me, after a moment. Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?”I don’t know why,” I said, even more disturbed and ill...

Reading Chip’s college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he’d bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of...

As to the fragments of morality that are irregularly and thinly scattered in those books [the Bible], they make no part of this pretended thing, revealed religion. They are the natural dictates of conscience, and...

[W]e, being who and what we are, cannot know unless we are taught by that which is other than we, and that means by the Spirit of God, albeit in diverse mediations. Though nature is...

In all of knowable reality, God is unique. He is knowable not like the multiplication table or the table of elements; he alone is knowable as the one totally in control of being known. He...

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the...

There was never meant to be death, he told them, and now there would be no more death. There was never meant to be war, and now there would be no more war. There was...

Each moment of gratitude awareness reveals the total beauty which surrounds you.

You don’t make waves unless there’s a reason, and it better be good. Because once you do, that’s it. You’re a trouble make, and they never think of you any other way.

To Judaism Christians ascribe the glory of having been the first religion to teach a pure monotheism. But monotheism existed long before the Jews attained to it. Zoroaster and his earliest followers were monotheists, dualism...

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most...

Every broken heart has one time or another asked, “What is important to me now?

The revelation is this: don’t wait for some revelation. We make our own luck.

We are walking through a field of burning bushes, of the everyday heroes God puts in our lives.

Sudden revelations vanish just as suddenly.

Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians...

She has always said that talking makes everyone feel better. He says talking is the equivalent of grooming. The tongue and fingers are governed by the same parts of the brain. He marvels at how...

The ultimate difference between God’s wisdom and man’s wisdom is how they relate to the glory of God’s grace in Christ crucified. God’s wisdom makes the glory of God’s grace our supreme treasure. But man’s...

But never has the Call been so clearAs now, when death’s cool handEases my spirit from my fevered body–And I answer the Call of the Master—The Call to new Heights.

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be...

The system wears a mask of civility, yet will quickly reveal its true nature in the form of magnificently-purposed violence when needed.

Truth cannot be constructed. To live in ideology is, as Havel so eloquently reminds us, inevitably to live in a lie. Truth can only be revealed. We cannot be creators, only receptors.

The less theorizing you do about God, the more receptive you are to His inpouring.

There is an ancient tribal proverb I once heard in India. It says that before we can see properly we must first shed our tears to clear the way.

Don’t waste your time trying to explain yourself to people that are committed to misunderstanding you. Instead, commit your time to explaining who they are to them. When you get a person to see the...

The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can’t all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the...

For the righteous, the revelation is a joyous event, the realization of a divine truth. But for the wicked, revelations can be far more terrifying, when dark secrets are exposed and sinners are punished for...

Revelation is God’s way of telling humanity that he is afraid of their possibility; the possibility of one day being able to surpass even him.

At dawn of man, many words of inspiration.At the end, there will be words of revelation.

You never knelt to get anywhere. You are where you are because you’re fucking capable, and willing to risk everything to do right, and I’ll never be half what you are even if I tried...

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.

Holy, holy, holy” in church, with a glimpse of the kitchen fire when she had come home on a dark autumn night, with the spirit-like blue of ice palms on a twilit pane, with a...

Scripture trains us to listen to and learn from stories of all kinds, inside the sacred text and outside, and to discern patterns and meanings within them. Stories of all sorts form and shape the...

Oh God—”He kisses me again, this time stronger,desperate, like he has to have me, like he’s dying to memorize the feel of my lips against his own. The taste of him is making me crazy;...

I not only want to understand God’s revelations, I want to be changed by them.

Tucker: Why would you tell me now if it’s against the rules?Clara: Because I love you.

Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The farther you get from the actual historical person of Jesus and His time, the more the church knows about Jesus and understand more deeply the truth of the Scriptures. We know more of the...

Words don’t have the power to hurt you, unless that person meant more to you than you are willing to confess.

It’s not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.

know” absolutely nothing—accessible to us and our ordinary, unmysterious lives. And more crucially: definite beliefs enable us to withstand the storms of suffering that come into every life, and that tend to destroy any spiritual...

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

Deferring judgement to a later date resolves nothing and all you are left with is a box of jumbled slides and a collection of knick-knacks and odds and ends. Here a face. There a sunset.

If what we know to be true does not translate over into the way we love one another, it is a misrepresentation of THE TRUTH.

One day, all those who love in the society of Auld Lang Syne shall meet again. In the New City of the Burning Heart, there, the veil will drop. The arc of the seas shall...

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.

And when I wake up it’s wonderful, like I’ve been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now,...

Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.