If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.

In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.

In the beginning was the Lie and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false.

Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope. The person of Jesus Christ.

In the end, coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

The hallmark of religion is to distrust claims made for mortal men. It is in ages of great religious faith that great skepticism can find expression.