Cornelius Castoriadis, the great French social philosopher of Greek origin, was asked once by an exasperated interviewer: "What do you want, Mr. Castoriadis - to change humanity?" He answered: "No, God forbid, I only want humanity to change itself, as it has done so many times in the past." I would be inclined to answer the same way.

The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.

The Bible unites its interpreters as a shared focus of attention, but it does not demand consensus. On the contrary, it invites and prods us to make responsible choices, to take responsibility for the choices that we have made... It was always like that, and our holy scripture grows over the centuries, gets thicker and thicker, with more texts around, which need/have to be looked into, referred to, considered.

If Christ would have left Christian ethics codified on the table, then he wouldn't produce moral beings choosing between good and evil, but conformists fulfilling orders. I think the same can be said about the Bible.

Some dozens of years ago, there was a debate conducted between people insisting that "this loaf of bread must be redistributed," and the others who said "instead of worrying about redistributing it, cutting differently, let's make it bigger." A third possibility was not imagined: that the loaf may be shrinking. But it is now a genuine possibility. It is even acting upon already, like in the case of the American invasion of Afghanistan and of Iraq in order to secure the supply of petrol for the Americans addicted to gas-guzzling cars.

Lev (Léon) Shestov, a Russian Jew who later became a French Jew and even converted to Catholicism, defined God not by His power to create the laws of universe, but His ability to break them at will - the capacity for miracles. God could cancel the past! For instance, God could decide retrospectively, that Socrates was never poisoned... Assimilation demanded a miracle: that you stop having been somebody else before... But only God can do it.

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.