The true believer is not someone who disengages from this world in order to focus on heaven, but rather the one who tries to make this world more like heaven.

Surely the better way is to pursue a generous orthodoxy, seeing disagreements in the context of the greater agreements which bind us together.

We must not think that religious concerns swamped all other social activities. They simply provided a focal point for them.

The true believer is not someone who disengages from this world in order to focus on heaven, but rather the one who tries to make this world more like heaven.

Clergy had a vested interest in retaining the old, ways, which made few demands of them as teachers, as spiritual guides, or as moral examples or agents.

Good does not triumph unless good people rise to the challenges around them.

If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into the sharpest focus? This is not an irrational retreat from reason. Rather, it is about grasping a deeper order of things which is more easily accessed by the imagination than by reason.