Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.