Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality.

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it - life begins in slime and ends in intelligence - whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins put the matter: We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else take it for granted that they are descended from gods.

Religion teaches us that our lives here on earth are to be used for transformation.

In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.

The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.

The crisis that the world finds itself in as it swings on the hinge of a new millennium is located in something deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies.

I had assumed that Bush's seemingly inflexible policy to support Sharon was for political reasons of his getting elected. But as to whether he really believes his actions are going to hasten the day of the final conflict, I do not know.