But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humor. (Nor should the Karl Barth who so loved and understood Mozart be regarded as such.)For humor is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the "progressives" nor the "integralists" seem to possess it - the latter even less than the former.

Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite.

It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one's treasure will not win one anyone's favours; one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone's camp... Beauty is the word that shall be our first.

Being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, the Christ upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.

Every experience of beauty points to [eternity].

If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.

St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.