If you have been in the vicinity of the sacred - ever brushed against the holy - you retain it more in your bones than in your head; and if you haven’t, no description of the experience will ever be satisfactory.

We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to answer all the big questions of life. The stories come from everywhere--from family, church, school, and the culture at large. They so surround and inhabit us that we often don't recognize that they are stories at all, breathing them in and out as a fish breathes water.

We do not choose between a life of difficulty and a life of ease. We simply choose for what purpose we will work, sometimes suffer, and hopefully endure.

This was football played at the speed of ice hockey and the ball was in play for only 53 minutes of the 90. The Premiership at its highest level is enthralling, edge-of-the-seat stuff, but sometimes it is too fast and frenetic for its own good.

It was always going to be a blues, soul, and rock-'n'-roll thing, because those are our ingredients. That's where we come from, and that's how we write. I think it has just become larger. We've just been able to use our imaginations so much more.

A community, a family, is a group of people who share common stories. The health of any community depends directly on the health of the stories the community embraces.

For the last 250 years or so, secularists have waited patiently for the fulfilment of their prediction that religion would die out in the next generation or two. But religious people have been singularly uncooperative, and new strategies have developed for controlling this blight on human progress. If religion won't "wither away" as philosopher Richard Rorty has wished, then perhaps it can be privatized and thereby removed from influence on public life‚ - sort of like localizing an outbreak of the plague.