The intensive, industrialised farming of poultry is humanity’s own version of the Ichneumonidae wasp.

Golda . . . they take the cross and turn it around, they turn it around my God.19 No, the Church never really tried to live the Jesus-life. What it did was to keep his story alive.

It was written in response to what Antiochus was doing in Jerusalem in 137 BCE, but its setting was Babylon during the time of the exile, more than three hundred years before. Like other apocalyptic texts – Revelation, the last book in the New Testament, is another example of the genre – it was dense with weird dreams and strange stories.

. It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha. I just most respectfully return him the ticket.4

No, a fear of ourselves, because we know what we are capable of doing to each other when we are possessed by these convictions.

Self-authenticating mystical experiences have always been threatening to existing hierarchical structure; it’s the same old tension between Dionysus and Apollo that never goes away.

Are we to understand here that we are to take the suffering that comes upon us as if it came from God, and in that way make something out of it, turn it to a good use?

even though we cannot make direct contact with the mind of the maker, we can connect with it indirectly through its handiwork.

imagine what looking up at the dome of the sky felt like for him. It must have been a combination of awe and intimacy. When we look up, there is awe certainly, but no longer any intimacy.