strange misapplication of the rigorous but quite limited methods of the modern empirical sciences to questions properly belonging to the realms of logic and of spiritual experience.

the contingent is always contingent on something else.

what we call goodness is, in its essence, God in his aspect as the original source and ultimate fulfillment of all love, drawing all things to one another by drawing them to himself.

To many, what was most startling about the new cosmology was not that humanity had been expelled from the heart of reality, but that change and disorder had been introduced into the beautiful harmonies above.

the loss of the larger sense of an integral unity of metaphysical and physical causes, and of a spiritual rationality wholly pervading and sustaining the universe—a loss that occurred at a subtler, more tacit, more unconscious level—opened an imaginative chasm between the premodern and modern worlds.

God is not some gentleman or lady out there in the great beyond who happens to have a superlatively good character, but is the very ontological substance of goodness.

God has come to be understood not as the truly transcendent source and end of all contingent reality, who creates through “donating” being to a natural order that is complete in itself, but only as a kind of supreme mechanical cause located somewhere within the continuum of nature.

One of the special appeals such language has for anyone familiar with the history of Christian theology, for instance, is how hauntingly close it comes to certain classical formulations of the trinitarian nature of the divine.

“being,” “consciousness,” and “bliss.”