What would be the point of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, eroded and poisoned, or personally free in a world entirely controlled by the government or enlightened by television?

It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.

People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.

The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.

A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.

Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.

The reason to preserve wilderness is that we need it. We need wilderness of all kinds, large and small, public and private. Wee need to go now and again into places where our work is disallowed, where our hopes and plans have no standing. We need to come into the presence of the unqualified and mysterious formality of Creation.