Sublime

It is very important to see that such a person did not pretend to know it all. On the contrary, being wise especially meant having a healthy respect for everything we do not know (a Greek wise man would never have been able to host a TV talk show).

In short, were Jesus to return in the flesh, he would be executed again, not by

Indeed, for Vattimo, the lightening of existence or, as he often refers to it, its weakening allows for a post-metaphysical return of religion. Nevertheless, any such “return” must, if it is to be legitimate, pass through God’s death, meaning that it must be “weak” (i.e. lacking ultimate foundations) rather than “strong.” Religion—and any other for

In modernity, reason defined itself by the exclusion of faith.

The history of Hamlet, the history of its performances, of so many interpretations of this enduring classic, is an example of repetition.

When we speak of something (say the United States) being “worthy of the name” (say, democracy), we are speaking of the event that name contains.

The sense of finitude—the sense of the ultimate fragility of everything we care about—is at the heart of what I call secular faith.

I am proposing that we should watch what happens in and to religion the way ecologists worry about the fate of frogs whose dwindling numbers tip us off to some wider phenomenon occurring throughout the ecosystem.