If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.

Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.

Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.

In my worldview, there are filers, and there are pilers. Filers think alphabetically. Pilers think geologically.

It would not have suprised Emilio Sandoz that his sex life was discussed with such candor and affectionate concern by his friends. The single craziest thing about being a priest, he'd found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life.

Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.

The sparrow still falls.