Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.

Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.

I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.

I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.

Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.

The only obligation I recognize is to say what I believe to be true [ ] and to say it with kindness. I believe that is how a Christian conversation should proceed.