I know the theological answers, but do my blood and my pulse?

Grace is costly because it calls us through our person to the person of Jesus Christ. And when we follow the person of Jesus Christ, when we follow his call through our person, we’re sent...

The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. (City of God, Book 19)

If you don’t know the difference between theology and religiousstudies, then you’re a theologian.

Our are speculations are not the measure of our God.

The conscious attempt to be a good person without Christ is as legalistic as an attempt to make it into Heaven through empty religiosity.

If we, who are finite, contingent, created beings, have got God completely figured out, it makes it seem likely that we invented him…If I am ever completely satisfied with my understanding of who God is...

What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.

Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know...

The gospel is the gospel of the cross. This means that God loves the objects of his wrath and that he, in his love, embraces men alienated from him.

Peruse all the sermons of Jesus and you will be sure to find parables, and sometimes allegory. What you will always find, however, is something of keeping our hearts in order.

He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.

If you do believe in God, and your first instinct in all things must be gratitude: for creation, or love, for mercy.

There is too much theology in the Church now, and too little of the Gospel.

Cosmopolitan discourse emphasizes the _cosmic belonging_ of all individual human beings as the ground of our hospitality, solidarity, justice and neighbor-love. Cosmopolitan discourse is about turning a _compassionate gaze_ onto others regardless of one’s nationality...

By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer’s icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.

If what they say is right we’re none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.

…only in the late 1100s and 1200s did scholars in Sicily and Spain translate Aristotle’s greatest philosophical and scientific texts. These translations had an impact reminiscent of those science fiction stories in which the world...

I’m of the opinion and quite certain that our ‘personal histories’ with God are meant to be well informed by the Scriptures

The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.

Tell me something. Do you believe in God?’Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. ‘What? Who still believes nowadays?”It isn’t that simple. I don’t mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I’m no expert...

To be God – to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response – to be miserable – these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the...

Swamp Thing, in Hell: “Demon…How…could God…allow such a place?Etrigan: Think you God built this place, wishing man ill and not lusts uncontrolled or swords unsheathed?Not God, my friend. The truth’s more hideous still: These halls...

Though I cannot entirely agree with you in supposing that extreme study has been the cause of my late indisposition, I must yet confess that the hill of science, like that of virtue, is in...

Gideon conquers, the church conquers, we conquer, because faith conquers. But the victory belongs not to Gideon, the church, or ourselves, but to God. And God’s victory means our defeat, our humiliation; it means God’s...

Those who love God with their minds, even if it gives them a headache, are those whose hearts stay on fire.

It can be a good thing if deeper theology, or philosophy, only makes one more uncertain. It may lead to a healthy doubt; he may throw his hands up saying, ‘God, I just don’t know...

Evil is powerful, but good is more powerful. In fact, evil is so powerful that only good has the power to overcome evil. Darkness can be driven away only by light.

Besides Zeus on his throne, Justice has her seat.

Fight for us, O God, that we not drift numb and blind and foolish into vain and empty excitements. Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst. Heaven...

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

Metagapism is the belief that love is the ultimate reality, literally god and the one shared soul, and the source, nature and destiny of all.

Stripped of its arrogance, its desire to make off with half of the patrimony and never be seen again, history belongs at the family table. If theology, the older brother, pretends not to need or...

The theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that...

Although I believe identity politics ‘”produces limited but real empowerment for its participants,” it is important to note that it contains significant problems: first, its essentialist tendency; second, its fixed _we-they_ binary position; third, its...

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...

It’s no fun to think about infinity and no cinche to write about it. Again, it helps to look for some human link.

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the...

Once, long ago, Jesus had called her name, breaking through the darkness of her oppression to set her free from the seven demons that bound her. now He broke through the hopelessness of her grief...

With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find the...

Only show compassion and empathy to those you can trust.” If we did that, we would be burying homeless people every day.

I believe we best say yes to God’s glory and sovereignty by saying no to Calvinism.

At best we are but clay, animated dust; but viewed as sinners, we are monsters indeed. Let it be published in heaven as a miracle that the Lord Jesus should set His heart’s love upon...

The resurrection of the body – what do we really mean by this? …Did not the mystics and sages of all times teach us that the positive meaning of death is precisely that it liberates...

IGNORANCE is without gaining Knowledge & Knowledge is gained without IGNORANCE

Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.’ I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

Worldliness proposes objectives which demand no radical breach with man’s fallen nature; it judges the importance of things by the present and material results; it weighs success by numbers; it covets human esteem and wants...

The mission of Jesus brought not a new teaching but a new event. It brought to people an actual foretaste of the eschatological salvation. Jesus did not promise the forgiveness of sins; he bestowed it....

How easy it is to read the Scriptures and give a kind of nominal assent to the truth and yet never to appropriate what it tells us!

Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one’s mind not be a blank slate but already properly...