Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.

Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.

Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.

Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.

The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity.

We should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.