“How do we actually know [God’s] love? You can’t just tell yourself ‘God loves me’ and expect your heart to change. Nor can you just say, ‘From now on I will love God.’ Love cannot be generated simply by an act of the will. . . . We must grasp and be gripped by the […]
“Augustine . . . observed that the heart’s loves have an order to them, and that we often love less important things more and the more important things less. . . . The ultimate disordered love, however — and the ultimate source of our discontent — is failure to love the first thing first, the […]
“But the day comes when you’re lying in the bath and you notice . . . that the way you’re living bares scarcely any resemblance to what you thought you always wanted, and yet, you realize you got there by a long series of choices.”- Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make […]
“If you are younger, it is natural to way to yourself, ‘I have heard about those disillusioned celebrities and wealthy people who say their life isn’t happy. But if I get anything like what I’m hoping for, I’ll be different.’ No you won’t. Though there is a spectrum of experience, nobody in the end has […]
“Most people, if they really learn how to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never keep their promise. . . . […]
“Christians believe that Jesus is the Logos that the Greeks intuited — the meaning behind the universe, the reason for life. But unlike the philosophers, Christians believe that the Logos is not a concept to be learned but a person to be known. And therefore we don’t believe in a meaning we must go out […]
“Traditional belief in God was the basis for discovered, objective meaning — meaning that is there, apart from your inner feelings or interpretations. If we were made by God for certain purposes, then there are inherent meanings we must accept. The meanings that secular people have are not discovered but rather created. They are no […]
“Life isn’t simply what you make it. Often it is what it is. We are not fully free to impose our meanings on life. Rather, we must honor life by discovering a meaning that fits with the world as it is.”- Timothy Keller In Chapter 3 (“A Meaning That Suffering Can’t Take from You”) of […]
“We have an incapacity for proving anything, which no amount of dogmatism can overcome. We [also] have an idea of truth which no amount of skepticism can overcome.”- Blaise Pascal, Pensee 406 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the […]
“Christianity, then saw the battle for human virtue as no longer one of head versus heart (becoming more rational), nor mind over matter (getting more technical mastery over the world). The battle was over where to direct the supreme love of your heart. Will it be toward God and your neighbor, no matter who that […]
“You can’t doubt belief A except on the basis of some belief B you are believing instead at the moment. So, for example, you cannot say, ‘No one can know enough to be certain about God and religion,’ without assuming that you know enough about the nature of religious knowledge to be certain about that […]
“To move from religion to secularism is not so much a loss of faith as a shift into a new set of beliefs and into a new community of faith, one that draws lines between orthodoxy and heresy in different places. . . . Many secular people . . . assume that belief is mainly […]