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

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

To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.

It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.