The Bible constantly warns against a merely mercenary relationship with God - a friendship of convenience or self-interest. We should not love God simply because doing so will produce many consolations in our life. We must enter a true relationship, were we fall in love not with His benefits, but with Him.

Hans Urs von Balthasar maintained that the best evangelistic strategy is to capture people with the beautiful, then enchant them with the good, and then lead them to the true.

The only thing particularly new about the "new atheism" is its nastiness.

Your faith will grow only in the measure that you give it away.

Again, I hear almost everyday from atheists who write off religion as primitive, premodern nonsense. I summon Aquinas, Augustine, Paul [of Tarsus], Teresa of Avila, Joseph Ratzinger, and Edith Stein-in all their intellectual rigor-as allies in the the struggle against this dismissive atheism.

The great danger of the new media is that it seems to relish the superficial. There has been an ethos within the Church for many years to pursue an accommodationist strategy in regards to the culture, and this has resulted in a public presentation of the Faith that is often nebulous or "dumbed down."

Both total accommodation to the culture and total resistance to it are usually signs of intellectual sickness.