It’s like all we ever do is leave. “Honey, all I know to do is go,” the Indigo Girls confess in “Leaving.”

Dunham, as you might guess, is not much given to religious impulses, but she is quietly fascinated by Karr’s faith, her association with this guy “Jesus.” So Dunham asks: “What’s it like to be a person who thinks and cares about Jesus and has religion in your life but hangs out with the New York literati?” Karr tries to defuse some mistaken

What if, buried in your ambition, is a desire for something more, someone else? Might that explain the persistent disappointment?

People look different through the lens of grace: instead of being competitors or threats, they’re gifts. Some are even friends.

For Augustine, those moments of “uncanniness”—of Unheimlich not-at-home-ness—are like postcards from the self you’re called to be.

The trajectory here will feel familiar: the night he made that choice, he caught a taste for blood, as it were, a taste for flesh, a passion that primed him to try again. Eventually, that satisfaction of the passion settles into the predictability of a habit—probably just about the time that it’s no longer a pleasure. The honeymoon is over; the

It is a terrible and terrifying thing to know what you want to be and then realize you’re the only one standing in your way—to want with every fiber of your soul to be someone different, to escape the “you” you’ve made of yourself, only to fall back into the self you hate, over and over and over again.

If there’s a map inscribed in the human heart that shows where home is, the fact that we haven’t yet arrived doesn’t make it a fiction. It might just mean there’s a way we haven’t tried. Maybe Camus gave up too soon. Augustine, his fellow African, might be a better guide.

For Augustine, we are made for joy. Joy is another name for the rest we find when we give ourselves over to the One who, for the joy that was set before him, gave himself for us. We find joy when we look for the satisfaction of our hungers in the Triune God who will never leave us or forsake us, when we find our enjoyment in an immortal God whose