If a currency is to become a growing, an increasing reserve currency, there has to be not only a demand for it there has to be a supply of it.

What gives life meaning is a form of rebellion, rebellion against reason, an insistence on believing passionately what we cannot believe rationally. The meaning of life is to be found in passion—romantic passion, religious passion, passion for work and for play, passionate commitments in the face of what reason knows to be meaningless.

For all of the advice in the magazines on "How to Keep your Love Alive," the salvation of love is not the prolongation of sexual desire but the shared lifelong cultivation of a romantic lightheartedness that softens conflicts and anxieties and focuses serious attention even as it undermines seriousness as such. It's hard to fall out of love so long as you're laughing together.

True, trust necessarily carries with it uncertainties, but we must force ourselves to think about these uncertainties as possibilities and opportunities, not as liabilities.

Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life.

Familiarity can no longer be a necessary condition for trust.

Trust opens up new and unimagined possibilities.