We should be empty of clutching, empty of self, empty of all the old ideas of substance. We should be ‘lost in the objectivity of world-love’, as I have elsewhere put it; or, perhaps better, we should let ourselves be only an empty space filled with brightness. Life lived like that is ‘eternal’ life.

A belief is made religious, not so much by its content, as rather by the way it is held.

Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs.

I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety.

Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity.

Remember that the past fifty years has been the age of the Big Bang cosmology. We have learnt to see all reality as a slow-motion explosion, as pouring itself out and passing away, as dissemination. We live in a postmodern epoch in which there is nothing absolute, nothing permanent and nothing substantial.

To love is to be vulnerable: if God loves, then God is mortal.