I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry.

Art is so often better at theology than theology is.

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

I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind.

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

I don’t believe in “laying to rest” the past. There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.

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