That is how life goes--we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's.

It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.

I would advise you against defensiveness on priciple. it precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level it expresses a lack of faith.

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.

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

I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.

I believe that reality is vastly richer than the cursory attention we usually give it permits us to understand. I like to write through a consciousness that allows me to suggest something of this richness.